Bright Green Lies (Monkfish Book Publishing, 2021) grumbles and growls like a rambunctious thunderstorm on an early spring day opening up darkened clouds of acid rain across the world of environmentalism, including celebrated personalities.

According to Bright Green Lies authors Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, and Max Wilbert: “We are writing this book because we want our environmental movement back.” As such, they charge ahead with daggers drawn, similar to Planet of the Humans (2019-20), nobody spared.

As explained therein, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) brought on the environmental movement as well as establishment of the EPA, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act. She did not call for “saving civilization,” which is the common rallying cry today (Civilization’s Last Chance by Bill McKibben or Lester Brown, The Race to Save Civilization). Rachel Carson called for “saving nature.”

“Today’s environmental movement stands upon the shoulders of giants, but something has gone terribly wrong… Mainstream environmentalists now overwhelmingly prioritize saving industrial civilization over saving life on the planet.” (pp. 26-27)

Losing the essence of environmentalism is part of the true grit of Bright Green Lies, a smart book that fascinates and teases the mind with solid usage of the “laws of physics” as it drills down into the depths of the nuts and bolts of green energy, renewable devices, and how this dream of Green has gone off track.

Bright Green Lies is a very controversial book within the environmental community because it is “deep green” in the sense that their argument leaves almost no room for modern-day civilization, and it is overly critical of today’s brand of environmentalists.

For example: “It should be noted that Deep Greens like JK&W are a tiny fraction of the environmental movement and a micro-sliver of the population. They are completely outnumbered by the activists fighting industrialism to defend our future on this precious planet… Bright Green Lies debunks the notion that modern civilization can be ‘greened. It obliges readers to face two vexing truths: industrialism is unsustainable and ecocidal—even if it embraces “renewable” energy.”  Bright Green Lies and Deep Green Deceptions, Craig Collins Ph.D. California State University East Bay)

In spite of JK&W’s penchant for reducing industrial civilization to a dust heap, their criticisms of “going green” inclusive of the public misconception of its structural viability, the actual build-out, is crucial for a proper public understanding of the challenges in combating global warming and loss of biodiversity, which is why this article was written.

Unfortunately, some of the big names in climate activism are roasted in JK&W’s analysis to make the point that industrial civilization is wrong-headed.

Environmentalists of the highest order, in the limelight, probably dislike the book because it tears apart statements and theses by the likes of Naomi Klein and Bill McKibben of how solar will heal the planet with the miracle of Germany as evidence to the world that the planet is so worth saving, just go green!

But according to Bright Green Lies, no, it is not a miracle, not at all. The public has been deceived by believing the books, articles, speeches, TV appearances boldly praising the quintessential green… a big drumroll please: It’s Germany!

For example, regarding “Naomi Klein’s quote from an interview with Democracy Now: ‘Twenty-five percent of Germany’s energy now comes from renewable energy’… She’s just plain wrong.” (p. 50) For the full breakdown see pp.  59-64.

“Recall Bill McKibben’s claim that ‘there were days this month when they (Munich) got half their energy from solar panels’… “He was referencing a two-hour period on a single day (not days) in the previous May. Munich did not get half its energy from solar panels. First, it got half its electricity from ‘renewables,’ which means, if Munich follows the German pattern of electricity accounting for 20 percent of total energy, then ‘renewables’ provided about 10 percent of Munich’s energy (for about two hours, on a Saturday).” Oops! (pp. 64-65)

Klein at 25% and McKibben at 50%, but it just isn’t true. According to Bright Green Lies, “Even with huge subsidies to renewables, wind and solar combine for a whopping 3.3 percent of all German energy consumption.” (p. 41)

But wait one moment!  Greens claim German renewables account for 25% or maybe 30% or maybe 74%, maybe a lot more soon to come. No, no, according to Bright Green Lies: Greens inaccurately conflate “energy” and “power” in ways that serve their political ends and thus unintentionally or intentionally deceive the public. Most likely, they accept numbers at face value and do not drill down to see where and how the numbers are really derived. Jensen and co-authors do just that; they drill down.

The “drill down” covers several pages, which readers of the book can easily access. Meantime, and most importantly: “Bright greens consistently fail to mention that electricity is only 20 percent of Germany’s energy usage.” A fact that is confirmed by scientist Robert Wilson, University of Strathelyde (est. 1796), a public research university: “Germany gets only 3.3 percent of its energy from wind and solar. Ignore the headlines.” (p. 66)

Read the book.  It’s easy to confirm only 3.3%. The authors lay it out in graphs and facts. It’s 3.3%. Bright Green Lies is therefore aptly named, and thus it’s a sad day for contemporary Greens, even though their hearts are in the right place. Sorry to say, if one accepts Bright Green Lies’ arguments, then renewables stink for a whole bunch of reasons, throughout 471 pages of detailed information.

Moreover: “The German Physical Society (the world’s second-largest organization of physicists) concluded: ‘Essentially, solar energy cannot replace any additional power plants.” (p. 71)

Hopefully, Bright Greens are not counting on dirty woody biomass as a renewable energy, which the EU has fallen in love with. It emits more CO2 than burning coal, as discussed in Bright Green Lies, and additionally, search: “The Woody Biomass Blunder”, Dissident Voice, 16 November 2021 to find opinions about woody biomass by climate scientists.

According to Bright Green Lies there are no easy answers to the inherently destructive forces of industrialization, especially when heartfelt Greens emphasize “saving civilization.” That’s the wrong target.

Accordingly, on page 54: “We’re going to suggest what is for this culture a radical redefinition of what it means for an action to be ‘green’ or ‘environmental,’ which is that the action must tangibly benefit the natural world on the natural world’s own terms. Not that the action helps fuel the industrial economy.”

That very important distinction is the essence behind chapter after chapter exposing lies that fuel the raison d être for the Green movement. Publicizing incorrect figures, hyped numbers about the success of renewables, creates false comfort “everything will be just fine” in the mindset of industrialists, politicians, and the general pubic. Not to worry.  This is working just fine.  Just look at Germany, we’re saved!

No, you are not!

All of which prompts serious consideration of the real world, inter alia, with the avalanche of renewable installations the past couple of decades, why do CO2 emissions keep on going up every year?

Mauna Loa Observatory (est. 1965)

November 2021 – 415.01 ppm

November 2020 – 413.12 ppm

November 2019 – 410.48 ppm

December 2012 – first crossover above 400 ppm

Ever since Mauna Loa recorded CO2, the number has gone up every year. Even worse yet, since the start of the new 21st century, annual CO2 has doubled over the 20th century.

According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, more than half of all industrial carbon dioxide emissions, since 1750, have been released over only the past 30 years. That’s a lot for the atmosphere to absorb in such a short time span. The repercussions have not really hit, yet.

As for wind energy, Mark Jacobson, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, whom mainstream environmentalists carry in highest regard because of his detailed plans to go 100% renewable by 2030 plans for wind power to fulfill ½ of global industrial energy needs by 2030. Among environmentalists he’s nearly a folk hero.

However, according to the authors, the scale of steel, copper, cement and assorted materials needed for Jacobson’s wind turbines is beyond enormous, to wit: “The scale of this project, then, is the equivalent of building perhaps 60,000 Hoover Dams in 12 years, more than 13 Hoover Dams per day.” (p. 115)

Yes, per day. And, the earth-moving equipment, mining, heavy transport, processing, tailing ponds, fossil fuels, toxic chemicals, composite fiber, steel rebars, and assorted materials in motion throughout the world supply network consumes herculean amounts of energy and raw material from Earth. It’s overwhelming.

Ever been to the Hoover Dam? Yeah, it’s a monster. The Hoover Dam elevator ride is 54 stories. Just imagine 13 dams per day? Hmm.

Wind turbines don’t function without massive amounts of earth moving. It needs to be stated that the mining centers and smelters for copper and production of steel and cement are environmental nightmares, as fully explained in the book, namely: “Green energy is made from: the dust of shattered mountains, lakes of acid, and the agony of our winged and scaled kin.” (p. 128)

Bright Green Lies is a thick book filled with facts that dissect the renewable energy platform and environmentalists to the nth degree. It should be required reading for anybody who really cares about the planet.

On page 151 the authors state their case in a couple of paragraphs: “Shiny fantasies of a clean, green future are being built on numbers that aren’t real. Most of us don’t have the time or the training to investigate past an article or two. We know there’s an emergency; we believe the educated, earnest leaders; we read headlines that ease our fears, and isn’t Germany doing it already? Someone has a plan- an engineer, a senator, an environmental group- and even if the details are difficult, surely the idea is basically sound? What we are asking you to consider is that the idea of ‘green energy’ is not sound- neither in the broad strokes (continuing to fuel the destruction of the planet is in fact a bad idea) nor in the particulars (that nondestructive sources of industrial scale energy exist).”

As a follow up to that address to readers of the book, they, the three authors, then go on to explain the results of two Harvard University researchers, David Keith and Lee Miller, who studied wind energy. The numbers do not add up. They took data from 57,000 wind turbines. The estimates of efficiency used by the US Department of Energy, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and green energy proponents do not match reality.

Since the wind energy reference is only one of many others mentioned in the book, it is important to state the evidence clearly so readers understand the depth of research, to wit: “For wind, ‘the average power density- was up to 100 times lower’ than common estimates. The power density for solar energy was also much lower than in widely used estimates.” (p. 151)

Also, any meaningful transition to renewables would require 5-to-20 times more land than the plans on the table. Here’s the big downer: “To provide for the U.S.A.’s total energy consumption, fully 72 percent of the continent would have to be devoted to wind farms. At the scale required, wind farms would be an active player in the climate system. They would change the climate. Please read that again.” (p. 152)

Bright Green Lies has 15 chapters of devastating facts and figures that take the entire Green edifice down onto its knees. It leaves a sense of hopelessness mixed with downright anger, wondering if this fact-filled tome is really as seriously damaging to the Green movement as it reads. That’s a very scary thought. It is very scary indeed. Whose voice can you depend upon?

Chapter 14 is titled Real Solutions. By and large, the only real solution is to stop industrial civilization. OMG! Does that mean no more hot showers, no more texting? What it does mean is: “Industrial civilization is incompatible with life on the planet.” And, as for a solution, it means: “Changing our lifestyle dramatically.” (p, 433)

In other words, instead of reshuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic, change the direction of the ship.

Roughly speaking, the options in chapter 14 are quite clear, change lifestyles or lose the planet. Take your choice. The chapter discusses the rebirth of nature with actual cases actually happening today. There is a way out of the morass. Read the book.

Meanwhile, here’s one example of human fortitude healing the planet, no technology involved: Location- India, “the Kuttemperoor River was used for illegal sand mining, sewage dumping, and worse. As more and more of the watershed became concrete, the river shrunk from 120 feet to barely 20. But then a group of 700 locals, mostly women, began cleaning up the river- primarily by physically wading into it, removing trash and plastic, and dredging out toxic silt. One of the participants, P. Viswambhara Panicker, wrote, ‘Initially many discouraged us saying it was a mere waste of money and energy. But we proved them all wrong.’ Within 70 days of the effort starting, the river had been restored to full flow. Local wells began to fill, and the stench of sewage was gone.” (pp. 441-442)

And, this statement: “The first step is to stop believing in bright green fairy tales that technology will save the planet. Instead, put your belief in soils, grasses, forests, seaweeds, and the billions of living beings who every moment are working to regenerate the conditions that support life and beauty on this planet. That is why we’ve written this book” (p. 441)

Pages 441-445 contain nine specific goals necessary for re-establishing a truly green world, starting with carbon reduction of current emissions of 20% per year for the next 5 years.

Bright Green Lies does have a conclusion. Here’s part of that conclusion: “We can debunk each and every piece of bright green technology, and ultimately it won’t make a bit of difference to bright greens or anyone else whose loyalty is not to the earth but to the economic and social system that is dismantling the earth.” (p. 467)

This article you are reading about Bright Green Lies only deals with a portion of a voluminous amount of research covering 471 pages of challenging facts. This has been written for the express purpose of bringing it to people’s attention because Bright Green Lies appears to be a well-researched gem.

Gems are rarely found!

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Evermore by Mihaela Melnic and Scott Thomas Outlar is a poetry and prose collection that focuses on reality as it is – a society that is hectic, engrossed in shallowness and mimicry, blinded by trend- guiding forces and people being followers like flocks of sheep in their daily routine life.

This book opens with Mihaela Melnic’s short prose-writing of how an island was born out of the union of two monkeys swinging on a ray of light. “Not sure if there was wisdom” and a paradise for fools was formed. The Monkey symbolizes human beings as mechanical/robotic in behavioural patterns and actions. This brings sarcasm/irony. It makes one wonder “Is the paradise real?”

Safety on the island is reflected in Melnic’s poem Across the Island:

“And our dwellings were safer than heaven.”

This gives a vivid imagery and emphasizes an innocent tone at first glance. However, there is a crucial poignant point here. It affirms that it was better than paradise. Normally, paradise is considered as the dream and well cherished refuge of all creatures. But here, the poetess dares to go beyond the general beliefs. This adds a tinge of poetic originality demarking the power of poetic imagination.

The disillusionment of Humankind in society is one of the dominant themes in this book. This is clearly revealed by:

1. Human beings confounding the real and the ideal and some holding on in between the real and imaginary perceptions. The lines of the poem The Hat clearly emphasize on that:

but the sea
is not even the sea

It is a huge hat
in which I sacrifice my head
thought after thought
largely

2. Putting good and evil on the same platform

This is shown in the poem One Way Ticket:

When we fell into Evermore’s jaws
that were flung open to welcome
both innocents and sinners…

Such unfairness echoes the Buddhist’s philosophy of the whole life and world being illusionary.

• 3. The false notion of love that people carry within their hearts

In the poem, Looking Back by Melnic the following lines say it all:

and every line you etched
on the tree bark
tells stories of a man whose love
was that of fools

Love that is usually considered pure, innocent and calming has an underlying illusory face of the unwise or illogical. Any mature person has undoubtedly experienced this.

Thus, it becomes clear through these writings that the cause of illusion is the ambiguous duality that puts human beings in a dilemma. One can spend a major part of life or even a whole life questioning about what is right or wrong or what is real goodness or villainy. People seem to be entrapped in this unending cycle.

The dedication section of this book states that the famous writer George Orwell has been one of the main sources of inspiration in the creation of this writing by Mihaela Melnic and Scott Thomas Outlar. We find echoes and similar glimpses of Orwell’s satirical and profound book Animal Farm in the following creative pieces: In the Fauces of the Farm (co-written by Outlar and Melnic), Ham & Havarti on Sourdough (by Scott Thomas Outlar), Synod (by Mihaela Melnic), The B*g Number One (by Melnic) and Hymnal for the Sun (by Outlar). All these poems reflect the Farm where animals rejoice, plot, rebel, and apply various strategies to fulfill their selfish needs. This is also applicable to the society where rulers and followers or politicians and non-politicians co-habit.

Another writer who has been a muse to this book as mentioned in the dedication part is Edgar Allan Poe, one of the best authors of the literary world. The poem Evermore (by Mihaela Melnic), which is also the title of this book, clearly echoes Poe’s poem The Raven as far as the tone, theme and the heavy, dark atmosphere are concerned:

In the darkest night of summer
as I plucked feathers off my raven
with the patience of those lunatics…….
……
while I plucked so, nearly crying,
the bell notified a message
for some bold creature there asking
the permission to write on………..
………………..
It wasn’t the summer of sober……

This emphasizes best on the mysterious, dark and strenuous societies that human beings live in. The Raven reflects something mysterious as well. “Is it an omen, a call of Death? What will be the aftermath?” Such thoughts often wander in the minds of all terrestrial creatures at some stage in life.

The Pandemic of Covid 19 hit the world during 2020 and all through 2021. Both the co-authors of this collection have not remained insensitive to this issue. The poems Faith (by Melnic), Nature and her Vacuum (by Outlar) and Going Viral (by Outlar) clearly point out the pandemic effect on the world and the Human race.

Lines from Nature and Her Vacuum give such a clear description of the situation:

I smell
the spell
of fear
behind your mask

Those lines reflect the fear of death characterized globally, human beings losing the superficial carefree joy of living and becoming conscious of a thin margin separating life and death.

Slavery to technology is another reality that we all live in on a routine basis. For more than two decades most people have been engrossed on the internet and applications on mobiles, PCs, laptops and tablets. Giving in to the Beast by Outlar shows how humankind has become addicted to technology. The following lines of Leviathan Engulfs by Outlar are like spears piercing the core of our minds and souls:

Google is
the type of God
that’ll lead you astray
and then suck you dry
to prelude slaughter.

This shows the dangerous impact of the internet on the public. It’s like a warning to humankind: “Beware! Beware of the information provided on the internet.” Indirectly, this is also a call for educated/literate people to logically analyse all information before internalizing and believing it as gospel truth.

Poets are often known as supporters of freedom and even being distinct from the mob. In Escaped from the Sheepfold Melnic says, “and I’m going my way.” Outlar’s poem, Broken Geometry echoes the same need to break off from the shackles engulfing the society. Therefore, both poets express the need for liberation from a fake and shallow society that we live in. The usual daring attitude of poets is emphasized in those writings. This also encourages people to be themselves and not follow the crowd with blindfolded eyes.

Both poets express their deep love and belief in the Art of poetry-writing through the respective poems An Ode to the Word (by Outlar) and Stateless (by Melnic). Both these writings lay emphasis on the strength of poetry and its being a means to liberate from all stress, burdens and barriers. Melnic says it so beautifully in her poem, “Dear poet, you are stateless.” This links poetry with freedom and a release from all segmented borders or groups.

The Divine Force has also been valued in this book through Melnic’s Ode to the Earth. In this poem Earth reflects glimpses of God. Thus, it is a call for humankind to respect Earth and God’s creation.

Finally, the book ends with two poems, one in normal verse style and another one in prose style. The poem Abomination’s End by Scott Thomas Outlar reflects a doomed society plagued by diseases and sufferings and humankind being in a “no way to escape” situation.

The last poem, Chewing the Cud III, written by Outlar, finally brings a call to establish a new, calmer and more beautiful world. This brings the deep message and essence of this collection of brilliant literary work.

The style of this poetry and prose book brings together the most profound creative energy of the poets/authors Scott Thomas Outlar and Mihaela Melnic. This work sheds light on reality rather than idealism and the pieces of featured writings are basically grounded.  The naked Truth, irony, sarcasm, hidden humour and poignancy flow in the pages of Evermore. The words flow so spontaneously that they instantly reach the minds, hearts and souls.

Evermore is undoubtedly a book that will wake up or shake the readers and break the walls of their comfort zones. This is a realistic literary gem, a must-read for all avid readers who value justice, tolerance, truth and an un-masked life or society.

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Review of British journalist Michela Wrong’s remarkable new book Do Not Disturb:The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad replete with a survey of some of the more notable reviews and the notorious¹ reviewers who reviewed it.

Do Not Disturb is a book out some six months now that has catapulted author Michela Wrong to a new low of infamy in the eyes of Paul Kagame, the President-for-Life in Rwanda, and those who applaud him.

Those who applaud Paul Kagame are generally of the cult-worshipping variety and have no real grasp on the historiography of Rwanda, its current events, or the politics of genocide and human rights there, or—more often—they are willing agents in the disinformation and fake news wars where, sadly, they have so disfigured the truth that they actually believe the stories that they tell.

The title Do Not Disturb refers to the sign found dangling from the gilded latch to Room 905 of the Michelangelo Towers Hotel, Johannesburg, where it worked its magic to shroud the crime inside. The dead man on the bed was Rwanda’s exiled Col. Patrick Karegeya, the ex-spy chief who once ran Rwandan President Paul Kagame’s tenebrous External Security Organization and who also, some say, played a role in Kagame’s foreign assassinations program. A smooth operator, Karegeya was for years tasked with handling outsiders, everyone from foreign ambassadors, defense attachés and intelligence operatives, to journalists and celebrities and academics.

Patrick Karegeya’s role as a ‘handler’ of outsiders was not unusual: anyone who visits Rwanda will be watched, their contacts vetted, their relationships ‘handled’ by agents of the criminal Rwandan regime. Anyone, and everyone. Most visitors are unaware of the nature and scope of surveillance practiced by Rwanda’s state security apparatus. (Further, they are directed to select genocide survivors—including Tutsis who were not even in Rwanda at the time—and they are shown a pile of skulls and skeletons and, well, their minds are lost forever.) Patrick Karegeya was tasked with handling the high profile visitors and those deemed potentially problematic—like journalists and fellow spies.

Patrick Karegeya was also the jester darling of donor-nation’s purse-string pullers: the cool Patrick Karegeya did his part to keep the money from foreign countries coming in. And it did. No matter the crimes committed by the shadow gang operating behind the faux front government in Rwanda, “no major donor moved to sever aid or impose sanctions, or considered exposing Kigali’s plots to public view.” ²

It is no small feat to kill a spook with the kind of friends found in Colonel Karegeya’s cell-phone contacts. A seasoned apostle in the Cult of Intelligence—no doubt cozy with MOSSAD, CIA, BOSS, MI-6, Canadian operatives—his friends in high places also included prominent foreign correspondents and diplomats.

Do Not Disturb is an apt title for another reason: There are a lot of people whose careers and reputations rest on the falsification of consciousness constructed like a sarcophagus to entomb the dirty secrets and ugly truths that the piles of skeletons at Rwanda’s and Uganda’s genocide memorials can’t point to and the skulls can’t speak to. It’s easy to pile up bleached bones and put a sign on them, declare them victims of the desired demographics, and that’s what Yoweri Museveni (Uganda) and Paul Kagame (Rwanda) did. They did it first in the Luwero Triangle of Uganda, later in Kigali and Ruhengeri and Gisenyi in Rwanda; in Congo they dumped the bones in mass graves — and in the Congo river and its massive tributaries — but they went back later and disappeared even these.³  In Rwanda the RPA also had their crematoriums, churning thousands of bodies to ash and smoke, disappearing all trace of their victims.⁴

“Unless you’re a pathologist, a corpse cannot tell its story.”  Author Michela Wrong reminds us that dead men tell no tales.  “By the mere dint of dying, it seems, [the victims] picked a side.”  Another page, she writes: “Patrick [Karegeya] certainly knew where all the skeletons were buried.” ⁵ 

Offering us a unique and deeply penetrating look at the internal workings of the “Grinding Machine” —⁶ that’s what Hotel Rwanda hero Paul Rusesabagina called the Rwandan government of Paul Kagame — that has churned innocent men, women and children to dust on the hills of Rwanda and the steamy equatorial forests of Congo, a disturbingly unique dictatorship that also eats its own.  Michela Wrong simultaneously offers us an incisive and comprehensive peek into a mind that is arguably the world’s most disturbed, the King behind the Cult of Personality, Kagame, and with that she exposes the mystery that lies at the heart of human evil. Hers is not a historical revisioning. It is a masterful storytelling of a story whose time to be heard has perhaps finally come.

Michela Wrong is a seasoned former foreign correspondent for Reuters, the BBC and Financial Times. If Do Not Disturb really is The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad it is much more than that. It is also the herstory of a middle class British lady who slogged the doldrums of beat reportage—”covering boxing matches, cycling races, gas explosions and rewriting stringer copy” for years ⁷ —all the way to Paris and to Abidjan (Ivory Coast) and to Kinshasa, from where she booked her story of the downfall of a dictator and the deluge that followed,⁸ and who would, one day, far into the unseen future, gain the confidence of a handful of media savvy guerrillas from whom she quickly bought their faux Marxist liberation story and sold it to the world on a currency of moral righteousness of the Good Guys v. Bad Guys Hotel Rwanda kind, only to find that she’d been hoodwinked and the glue didn’t stick and the victorious Tutsi left to tell the story, ever whining about their victimhood, weren’t quite the saintly Disciplined-Tutsi-Rebels-Who-Stopped-the-Genocide-and-Won-the-War-and-Rebuilt-Rwanda-in-His-Utopian-and-Egalitarian-Image saviors that their manipulative propaganda—bludgeoned into peoples’ heads through bullying and fear and constant repetition and guilt, especially the guilt—made them out to be, and who, even in the dawning awareness of their treachery and deceit and the creeping cognizance that she too was walking-the-thin-bloody-line between filing Dispatches and being Dispatched—off with her head!—kept on poking holes in the officially authorized but ever unfolding Untold Story ⁹ with a persistent dedication to telling it.

Paul Kagame has ruled Rwanda more like a ruthless Tutsi King from the pre-colonial era than like your typical 20th century democra-despot. I mean, the world has seen some choice head-choppers — Augusto Pinochet (Chile), Henry VIII (England), Paul Biya (Cameroon), Suharto (Indonesia), General Gnassingbe Eyadema (Togo), Charlemagne (France), but the dictate Off with their heads! takes on a special new meaning for all those Rwandan masses living in fear amidst the secrets and subterfuge of the thousand hills of Rwanda’s rebirth and the man who dreamed It.¹⁰

Some reviewers of Do Not Disturb produced simplistic reviews emulating the essentialized fiction of the Hollywood film Hotel Rwanda: to them Paul Kagame and the Rwandan Patriotic Army¹¹ are saintly. Some reviewers mount veiled attacks against the author and the camp they presume her to belong to; other critics engage in mental masturbation. Many of them regurgitate abandoned theories that always strained credulity. Reviews are launched like volleys across some epistemological battlefield, clear testimonials to the reviewer jockeying for ascendance in the ever shape-shifting Intellectual and Propaganda War being waged between privileged whites¹², (and a few people of color from the comprador class) to be heard about all things Heart of Darkness and the shadowy kingdoms and fiefdoms orbiting its periphery.

Welcome to the Cult of Elitist Camps of High-Minded-Moral-Judgers-in-Chief of Events and History in Central Afrika (sic).¹³  Not even a machete will help readers cut through the fictions to expose the facts given the competing narratives and personalities and hubris and vitriol surrounding the politics of genocide in Central Afrika. The New York Times Magazine’s fictional hit-piece on Paul Rusesabagina by Joshua Hammer last March (2021) is a stellar example: “He Was the Hero of ‘Hotel Rwanda’: Now He’s Accused of Terrorism.” ¹⁴

A Pop Survey of  Reviews

Even the most hostile of the Western book reviews that populate our most prestigious journals and papers-of-record can’t rival those cranked out by the Keepers of the Royal Word in Kigali. Hence, at one extreme, we have Rwanda’s abacurabwenge—the specialists at King Kagame’s court. Just like in olden times, these are subjects of Kagame’s Kingdom authorized to defend the latest Toothpick King at all costs, and they do so by any means necessary: lies, distortions, slanders, ad hominem attacks. People like Tom Ndahiro, one of King Kagame’s perpetual propaganda peddlers who pops up in academia and the press and wherever the need arises to murder some everyday truth to enshrine some establishment lie.¹⁵, ¹⁶ 

By the way: the ‘toothpick’ descriptor is herein used as an adjective, not a noun, to describe the tall skinny aristocratic Tutsi Kings and, Rwanda’s President—he is no king, no more than he is a freely elected President—Paul Kagame, at 6 foot 2 inches, is the stuff of which Tutsi Kings were made. The former Tutsi monarchs were all tall and very skinny: King Mutara III Rudahagwa was 6 foot 8 inches and his successor King Kigeli V was 7 foot 2 inches. “There’s a disconcertingly otherworldly appearance to these etiolated, Giacometti-slim monarchs,” writes Michela Wrong, “with their high foreheads, protruding teeth, and endless legs…”

The great “white fathers” of the Belgian catholic church surround the late King Mutara III Rudahigwa, who died under unusual or suspicious circumstances in Bujumbura, Burundi, in 1959.

And it seems that the toothpick phenotype is not all King Kagame has inherited: there is also the pre-colonial legacy of violence—the Royal ruthlessness, suspicion, spying, subterfuge, abuse, intrigue, cunning of the King’s Court—where, Michela Wrong reminds us, “[t]he palace compound was a vipers’ nest of scheming gossip, two-faced informers, incestuous couplings, and deadly familial plots.” ¹⁷

King Kagame adapted his precursor’s templates of violence to his contemporary panopticon. Battalions of the toothpick King Rwabugiri had a propensity to wiping out every man, woman and child at the King’s whim. King Kagame has carried the aristocratic Tutsi ruthlessness and supremacy of his forbears—attitudes, prejudices and behaviors premised in absolute superiority, including the license to extort, enslave, mutilate and murder—into a present where total control begins with the control of people’s thoughts, and this is done by manipulating the mass media, spinning the narrative, wagging the dog.

The Scribes of the Kagame Court, you see, must take care not to disappoint the regime—which is really about pleasing the President King—else they might uncertainly suffer the fate of the not-so-few-fallen-out-of-favor who were routinely abused, slapped, slandered, kicked, raped, killed or silently disappeared on the King’s orders. Of course, for the lucky survivors, the abuse has not stopped. Kagame—the toothpick King—routinely abuses his subjects. Do Not Disturb shares shocking tales told by repentant RPA rogues now out of favor with the King.

“They learned the importance of punctuality.” Michela Wrong is here speaking of civilians who suffered the President King’s petulance. “When a cabinet meeting was called, Kagame would often wait behind the door, and anyone who dared arrive late would receive a kick to the buttocks sending them sprawling.”

It’s comical to imagine. This is one of the world’s most decorated leaders. In Do Not Disturb, King Kagame’s former comrades paint a portrait that evokes images of an animated toothpick cartoon character obsessed with springing out of the shadows to waylay his workers. Comical, but sanguinary, pathetic, disturbed. How many prestigious colleges and universities have honored Kagame as a speaker or conferred Honorary degrees on him?

King Yuhi V Musinga (1883-1844):  Reign: December 1896 – 12 November 1931

Mass murder is a messy business, and it hasn’t always gone the King’s way. Look at Kibeho: thousands of Hutu refugees systematically mowed down on the orders of King Kagame. What a pickle! You’d think. Right? In the north, in the south, in the middle of Rwanda, in the Congo, the atrocity business is a big job. Massacres were mismanaged. Villagers escaped, arms dangling, brains spilling out. Reports were filed, then unfiled, then buried, then denied. Shit happens. “Like the cyborg running down its assigned victim, this vengeful Terminator never stops,” Michela Wrong reminds us, “even when the pursuit comes across as bizarrely self-defeating.” ¹⁸

The King, it seems, is perpetually disturbed. His punishment for soldiers was worse. Another day and his hoe-happy killers have slipped up. Made a mess of things. Let those phantasmagorical Hutu holdouts from Congo hop over the frontier, infiltrate northwestern Rwanda. His Hateful Highness ordered some 1500 of his Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) soldiers and gendarmes to assemble at barracks. The defense minister arrived followed by a Tata lorry under escort of his military police—his homegrown manifestation of the East German Stasi. “It was loaded with whips. As the troops watched in stunned silence, Kagame systematically whipped his senior commanders, while his military police meted out the same punishment to his junior officers.” ¹⁷

Reminiscent of the utter brutality of King Kigeli V Rwabugiri (1840-1895), the bloodiest of the feudal Tutsi Mwamis that preceded Kagame by a hundred years—and one that Kagame claims his lineage to—some fifty to sixty commanders were whipped. It took—Michela Wrong reports—the entire afternoon. ¹⁷

Q:  And generals?

A:  And generals. ¹⁹

Even General James Kabarebe—the legendary RPA kingpin who so loyally served Kagame and comrades during their genocidal adventures in the ‘rebellions’ and coups d’etat and ongoing interventions²⁰ waged from Uganda to Rwanda to Congo and back—has frequently suffered outrageous humiliations born of the sick soul soup of temper tantrum and paranoia and narcissism that make Paul Kagame the unique and bona fide psychopath that he is.

Do Not Disturb chronicles such phenomena seen from the eyes of the secretive clique of those closest to King Kagame, and Michela Wrong gets it right enough. For that the Royal Scribes declared her a Genocide Denier, and one who set out a priori to smear the government (sic) of Rwanda.

Oh, please. Nothing could be further from the truth.

We can imagine King Kagame’s reception of the book. Delivered by some functionary, the King makes the messenger wait: she stands before him, head bowed, wringing her hands. Heir Hitler, sitting on his throne, quietly inspects the book. He turns it in his hands, reads the Jacket Blurbs praising the book and its author. “Refreshingly free of jargon” says Rene Lemarchand. “Profoundly criminal regime” says Filip Reyntjens. “Ruthless dictator,” says Adam Hocshchild ²¹  Insults to the King, all of them. The toothpick King tightens. He flips open the jacket cover. More insults. The King snorts. Murmurs to himself. Turns pages. Suddenly (by page 9) he snaps. Throws the book down. Bolts out of his plush leather chair (studded with Congo’s diamonds?). Stomps feet, bangs fists on desk, shakes with rage. Screams and yells, in Kinyarwanda. Foams at the mouth, searches for scapegoats (having already shot the messenger).

If you think any of the above is overstatement you are wrong, and none of this is past tense (excepting the lives already lost). And unless you count yourself as an acolyte of the Cult of High-Minded Moral Judgers & etc. shouting to drown out all competing camps—which is pretty much the scene out there in the nebulous stratospherean Public Realm—you probably don’t understand exactly what makes James Kabarebe so legendary, but I do, and I’m doing my best to elaborate such details in a spirit of tolerance and expansionist understanding that “combines rigor and humility, i.e. passionate conviction plus sedulous respect for the convictions of others,” i.e. a Democratic Spirit. ²²

The actual wars and war crimes on the ground in the Great Lakes of Afrika can’t hold a spear to the brutal Propaganda Wars waged with Sycophantic Acclaim and Ruthless Derision between the academics and the journalists and the human rights advocates and the editors and all the others in the Cult of High-Minded-you-know-whats.

At the heart of this tale is the rise and demise of Colonel Patrick Karegeya, a man whose charm mesmerized many a journalist and bureaucrat and ambassador— all of whom helped whitewash the blood from his hands. “To pick up a foreign magazine or newspaper and know he’d helped bring about the glowing portrayal of Rwanda’s new administration printed therein gave him a thrill of quiet satisfaction. He was helping to coax a story of heroic resurrection into being, a saga so poignant and uplifting it would entrance the world.” ¹⁷

And the world remains entranced.

The Elephant in the Room 

Exemplifying one of the better reviews on the scale of lousy to lousier, consider “The Dark Underside of Rwanda’s Model Public Image,” penned for the New York Times by their erstwhile former East Afrika Bureau Chief and Central Afrika expert Howard W. French. ²³  A reasonable, though abbreviated and essentialized overview of some of the relevant history mixed up with a disparate grouping of facts, the review is more about the reviewer’s experience in the blood-drenched forests of Equatoria than it is about the book.²⁴

“There is a taut, cinematic quality to Wrong’s account of Karegeya’s killing, and a mournful, hurt tone as well.” Howard W. French nonetheless shares a poignant insight. “[M]ournful because Karegeya, a skilled, seductive handler of Western reporters, had been a key source for [Michela] Wrong while he was in government. The hurt that infuses her story is more subtle, but ultimately more important.”

Ah, the subtleties of the ‘Rwanda Story.’ Oh, oh, oh so much intrigue, disinformation, outright lies, ethnocentrism, sordid rogues, conspiracy theories, and bona fide conspiracies—a thousand hills of opinion teetering on the edge of a great rift; so many people blinded by the propaganda groping in the darkness and clinging to the disjointed parts of the elephant in the room—obtusely pretending to misunderstand the nature of the beast.

What is the elephant in the room? It is the involvement of the Western interests behind and beside the Rwandan Patriotic Army/Front that so many ‘experts’ expertly ignore or, worse, deny. The military intelligence apparatus, the multinational corporations, the Western diplomats, the shady covert operators, the foreign mining magnates—where are they? Oh, right, this is Africa (sic).

The elephantine question here is why Mr. French perpetually propagates the ‘mystery’ myth of the double presidential assassinations of 6 April 1994? The “mysterious 1994 downing of an aircraft carrying the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi— both Hutu,” he wrote. And again: “The plane, shot down by unidentified attackers as it approached Kigali…” Mr. French, no doubt, is unwilling to stick his neck out. (Off with his head!)

On several key controversial issues, Michela Wrong weighs the igneous evidence and slippery theories and the dumb deliberations about, e.g., Hutu hardliners and their diabolical conspiracies. There are plenty of these and Michela Wrong disembowels some of them. Ridiculous unfounded claims, e.g., that Agathe Habyarimana, Juvenal Habyarimana’s wife, was in cahoots with the ‘Hutu hardliners’ and that is who and how her husband came to be killed. Do Not Disturb pretty much resolves Mr. French’s ‘mystery’ about who shot down the plane. Of course, his review doesn’t discuss any of that (which makes you wonder if he read her book or just skimmed it or merely gleaned a few facts to fabricate a convincing review). At the heart of Michela Wrong’s plane-crash-by-missiles treatment, of course, is the tidy denouement delivered by the indefatigable Filip²⁵ — “The RPF did it.”

Howard W. French reviews his-story as much as her-story, and his imperfect review is more honest than most. Still, one wonders why a Columbia School of Journalism prof who has walked in the footsteps of Mr. Kurtz and criticized the follies of the King in Kigali keeps slipping on the same banana peel and falling flat? It’s a mystery, indeed. I mean, Mr. French speaks six languages, has authored a slew of books, and he mildly protested the slaughter of a few hundred thousand Hutu refugees in Congo, a criticism which was heresy at the time and practically still is, and both his observations and his criticisms (sic) are now forever booked in A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope for Africa—replete with clear unequivocal evidence of the perverse and hostile prejudices that he harbored against the Hutu refugees and which absolutely contributed to their extermination.²⁶  Mr. French is very accomplished, and he’s very smart, and he really gets around. So what’s all this mystery nonsense about?²⁷

Another problem with Mr. French’s framing is his regurgitation of the Cattle-Herding-Tutsis-as-Victims-of-Hoe-Happy-Hutu-Killers narrative, a cud-chewing exercise that so many arm-chair Central Afrika sailors have salivated over, and the very same narrative that Kagame et al defend by Royal Fiat of the Genocide-Ideology-and-Denialism-Hunt-Them-Down-and-Silence-Them-Forever kind.

“As Hutu swept to power in Rwanda’s 1961 elections, scattered Hutu pogroms against the Tutsi broke out.”  The ‘Hutu swept to power,’ he writes, and Belgium had their backs, and the Tutsi—ever threatened and marginalized and persecuted—poured out of Rwanda. That is standard establishment fare. With a couple half-truth sentences like the one above (turning the facts on their heads) Mr. French obliterates a decade of the elite Tutsi aristocracy’s temper-tantrum terrorism. He is not alone in that. And then, next para, he skips to 1972 where he (properly) situates the Hutu genocide in Burundi as a portent of the bloodshed to befall Rwanda (1994). “Little heed was paid to it at the time,” he understates, “and Wrong mentions it only in passing…”

Huh? Mr. French never parses the ‘Tutsi’ demographic into the coexistent but counter-veiling factions of (1) the petulant Tutsi patricians who ran the show and (2) the ‘petit’ Tutsi paupers who suffered for it. This is important: for centuries the latter peasants had their backs broke toiling soil and toppling trees for the former, the toothpick Tutsi nobility who treated them like Hutu squat. ²⁸   To ignore the distinction is like dismissing Devlinism ²⁹ in any reasonable discussion about Joseph Desire Mobutu which, of course, is exactly what you get if you read Howard W. French’s book A Continent for the Taking ²⁹ which pretty much eschews any real hard truths in favor of a vague His-torical expeditionary memoir of the Howard W. French in Africa (spelled with a ‘c’) variety. For Mr. French to name drop Michela for such a peripheral offense is, well, just wrong.

“But the coup in Burundi turned into one of the worst ethnic killing sprees of the 20th century,” Mr. French concludes. “Hundreds of thousands of Hutu were slaughtered by a Tutsi army, and thousands of others streamed into Rwanda, where tales of their persecution further radicalized the Hutu majority.”  ³⁰

Indeed. Got that right.

The Nail that Sticks out Gets Hammered Down

One of the latest victims to be ensnared in King Kagame’s lurid lair is Paul Rusesabagina, the real-life hero of the Hollywood film Hotel Rwanda, abducted from Dubai. The details of his kidnapping and capture have been revealed, but the truth about Paul R. has been clouded and distorted and—like the man—tortured. Held hostage since August 2020, Paul R. was then tried for terrorism by the courts of King Kagame.

Over the years since Paul Rusesabagina himself went into exile there were also attempts on his life. The story of one Paul’s heroism, his rise to fame, his abduction, his trial, and so many sordid or unsorted details would make a great read. Michela Wrong managed to squeeze in several paragraphs pointing to Paul R.’s plight, and the greater story she tells provides an appropriate context to view and understand Paul R.s’ kidnapping and his captors. Now Paul R. is in prison, the trial concluded. As the trial of Paul R. proceeded, the behavior of the court’s courtiers and clerks and counsels became curiouser and curiouser. Here is an ordinary man, an extraordinary story,³¹ but they sentenced the wrong Paul.

Weighing in on King Kagame’s side we have the NYT Magazine hit-piece of March 2021. Joshua Hammer assaults the truth in his 7000-worder hammered together with all the duplicitous doublespeak that King Kagame’s Royal Scribes have ever edicted. You know, all the usual stuff the King burps up about Tutsi-hating Hutu hold-outs hunkered in hapless Congo prepped to rain apocalypse down on poor little Rwanda at the first sign of some splinter in the indurate fortress of Kagame’s toothpick Kingdom.

Joshua Hammer is one of those worldly journos who reported from the ‘safe zone’ in 1994, the Sleeping-with-the-RPA kind described by Michela Wrong in Do Not Disturb. He traveled around the killing fields in a sporty Isuzu Trooper with an RPA escort and an AK-47-clutching [RPA] bodyguard and, obviously, routinely rubbed the blood off his boots with the lies of the RPA High Command, then pimped his fiction to Newsweek, which is ever ready to regurgitate the party line. ³² In 1994, in the arms of the RPA, he toured “the half of Rwanda overrun by Tutsi rebels since the slaughter began” and this is the genesis of his long litany of lies. Joshua Hammer never disclosed his cozy RPA relationship to the readers of the NYT Magazine.

Joshua Hammer’s post-publication pride in his cunningly-crafted-and-oh-so-deceptively-savvy character assassination of Paul Rusesabagina and his systematic dismantling of the standard interpretation of Paul R.’s plight is hammered sharp as nails in one obscure post-publication Facebook comment in response to a starry-eyed follower: “I’m hoping that my views, such as they are, come across in the piece. That Rusesabagina’s downfall is far more complex than the standard interpretation: that he is a human rights hero who was ‘kidnapped’ by a ruthless dictator determined to silence all criticism (emphasis added). ³³  At some point [Paul Rusesabagina] did seem to go over to the dark side, swept away by naiveté, ambition, and who-knows-what-else.” ³³

Joshua Hammer’s biases don’t stop with his dismissal of the crime of an international abduction. He also nurtures delusions of a shared trajectory of victimization between ‘his tribe’ and the ‘Tutsi tribe’—the old Jews of Africa theme that was annealed to the Rwanda genocide narrative with the golden goose of Gourevitchism.³⁴ 

The opening spread of Joshua Hammer’s March 2021 New York Times Magazine feature article hit-piece on Paul Rusesabagina.

Dr. Brian Endless is professor of Political Science and Director of African Studies at Loyola University Chicago, and he’s spent years working with Paul R. and his Hotel Rwanda Rusesabagina Foundation.  When the fact checkers of the NYT Mag unloaded the quotes that Joshua Hammer had attributed to him, they didn’t check. Asking around, Dr. Endless learned that his were not the only mis-quotes chambered for publication, so he emailed the editors seeking to retool the Hammer story.

“I have never even considered going over a reporter’s head to talk to their editor,” Dr. Endless wrote.  “Time after time those of us who spoke with Josh [Hammer] presented him with facts and he is not looking at them… He should not be allowed to write this story and a more objective journalist should be substituted.”

“Sadly but as expected, the final article by Joshua Hammer is a stereotypical example of ‘hack journalism’ at its worst.” Brian Endless again emailed the editors after the story ran. “I do not use ‘hack journalism’ here lightly, but I believe the dictionary definition applies.³⁵  Joshua interviewed me and many other people affiliated with Paul Rusesabagina, plus a number of journalists and academic experts. He clearly ignored all of our input, and instead told the story that has been put out since shortly after the terrible 1994 genocide by the propaganda machine of Rwandan President Paul Kagame.” ³⁶

“The problem is, most of Hammer’s pro-Kagame/anti-Rusesabagina sources are close to Kagame’s regime.” Canadian journalist Judi Rever pokes at Joshua Hammer’s inflated ego. “Hammer does interview several individuals who are critical of Kagame or close to Rusesabagina, but their comments are stripped of their context, and come off jarring and misleading.” ³⁷

Joshua Hammer never informs his readers that King Kagame’s British propagandist Andrew Mitchell is a British MP and former UK Development Minister who earns US$ 55,802 annually—paid by Rwanda.³⁷  The US Ambassador for War Crimes in 2003, Pierre Prosper “negotiated a deal in which the UN’s International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda handed over jurisdiction for prosecuting RPF crimes to Kagame’s own government—allowing the criminals to investigate themselves, and granting Kagame de-facto immunity for war crimes. Pierre Prosper also happens to be Kagame’s personal lawyer. Why didn’t Hammer mention this?”³⁵

My attention to Joshua Hammer’s hit-piece against Paul Rusesabagina is no diversion from the book under review. It rather hits the nail on its head.

The operation to kidnap Paul R. “succeeded in one key regard,” wrote Michela Wrong in Do Not Disturb: “[i]t sent a cold chill down the back of every government critic based abroad, hammering home the “You can run but you can’t hide” message Kagame voiced at [a] prayer breakfast after Patrick’s [Karegeya’s] murder.”³⁸

Joshua Hammer continues to peddle the perfidious proofs and twisted truths produced by the Kagame killing machine. Unlike Howard French, Joshua Hammer has never equivocated over the double presidential assassinations of 6 April 1994. “The assassination—blamed by Hutu hardliners on the Tutsi rebels—set the plot to exterminate the Tutsi minority in motion.” In a GQ article packed with Hutu hate and all the racist distortions born of his early Rwanda sojourns in RPA la-la land, Joshua Hammer peddles the elite Tutsi lie that Hutu extremists killed their own. “(A U.S. State Department intelligence report would blame Hutu extremists—members of Habyarimana’s elite presidential guard—for shooting down the jet.)” ³⁹ 

And, Voila! The pesky problem of who killed the two dead presidents is duly dispatched.

In September 2021 Joshua Hammer appeared on an AfricaNews.com blog legitimizing King Kagame’s kangaroo courts and the pre-ordained verdict against Paul Rusesabagina. AfricaNews.com is an elite pro-business venue, affiliated with the establishment press and partnered with EuroNews (which earned $138 million from the European Commission 2014-2018), that whitewashes the plunder of Africa and its plunderers under the slogan “made by Africans for a growing Africa.”

Joshua Hammer obviously dismissed Michela Wrong’s book. He didn’t read Judi Rever’s important book In Praise of Blood  ⁴⁰  and he didn’t read your humble correspondent’s latest garrison series on Rwanda⁴¹ and he knew about all of these because he contacted all of us and we all responded, sincerely, politely, honestly, in good faith. When Judi Rever told him how the RPF mobile killing squads operated to routinely hunt, murder, incinerate and disappear thousands of Hutu people, Mr. Hammer would have none of it.

“These brazen, or gullible, revisions of history found an eager audience amongst groups of Hutu extremists in exile who were looking for ways to damage Kagame’s credibility,” he wrote, in his attack on Paul Rusesabagina, “to minimize Hutu culpability and, for some, to justify attempts to retake Rwanda by force.”

Look out ! Here come those Tutsi-hating Hutu hold-outs hunkered in hapless Congo again!

The nasty graphic that accompanied Joshua Hammer’s hit-piece against Rwandan Hutu businessman Felicien Kabuga: “The Epic Hunt for One of the World’s Most Wanted Men  GQ, January 19, 2021.

Alas, Joshua Hammer wrote what he wanted, and the NYT fact-checkers who called us (his sources) didn’t care that they (we) disputed the quotes attributed to us, or the context, or both. We were the chosen ones, the contrarian ‘sources’ selected to create the illusion of balance, and Joshua fit the battle of propaganda to malign us as conspiracy theorists: his goal from the get-go.

He calls us the Big Lie Propagators.⁴¹

“There is a kind of outcry and a claim that there was a miscarriage of justice,” Joshua Hammer chirped, “that this was a foregone conclusion, that the president of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, was determined to silence one of his main political enemies. While there may be some validity to that, the larger truth is that all the evidence shows that Rusesabagina is guilty.”⁴²

Fact is, Joshua Hammer slept with the RPA at ground zero and has pimped for them ever since.

Indeed, the larger truth is that all the evidence shows that Joshua Hammer is an unabashed apologist for mass murder, he has actively promulgated anti-Hutu sentiment and anti-Hutu disinformation in support of the genocide against Hutu people, and that he appears to be an operative for the CIA or MOSSAD (or both).

As smart as he is, Joshua Hammer didn’t think for himself—off with his head!—he merely reconstituted the RPA’s tired warped enduring brilliant narrative, with no lie left disinterred by his ego, his self-interest, his prejudices or his wrong historiography—a DO NOT DISTURB sign dangling from the doors of his imperception. Here was another machete-job where the author’s projections and his interests and his pandering for popularity disfigured the subject being writ—and his editors put the New York Times brand on it.

Not so with Michela Wrong: no branding here. No matter the faults of the book, its author launches into the fray with a humble and painful public admission. “As examples of the RPF human rights abuses and unaccountability accumulated, I was not the only previously supportive journalist who winced, frowned, and was quietly grateful to be writing about other things. My career had taken me elsewhere, Rwanda was no longer my beat. Still, it was painful to accept that I might have unwittingly misled my readers.”

This is the hurt flagged by Howard French (in his review).  It is also “a little silvery salamander of shame that flips over inside me” now and again, she wrote.⁴³ 

Q:  “So, how do you write Rwanda’s contemporary history,” she asks, “when so many key sources now readily admit they lied at the time?” ⁴⁴

A: Read the book.

The Roots of Rwanda’s Genocide

One of the most accurate and yet simultaneously scathing reviews appeared in the New York Review of Books. In “The Roots of Rwanda’s Genocide”,⁴⁵ the reviewers criticized Michela Wrong for, they said, glossing over atrocities committed against Hutu people in northern Rwanda by RPA soldiers, pre-1994, under the command of Paul Kagame, and for glossing over the Rwandan (RPA) and Ugandan (UPDF) slaughter of Hutu refugees—mostly unarmed, non-combatant men, women and children—in the Congo (Zaire) 1996-1997. The reviewers had other complaints too.

“Wrong’s decision not to go into these details gives Do Not Disturb a move-along-nothing-to-see-here flavor that deflects scrutiny of [Patrick] Karegeya and [General Kayumba] Nyamwasa, with whom she clearly sympathizes,” wrote Helen Epstein and Claude Gatebuke.

The reviewers complain about what is in the book and what isn’t, and they accuse the author of disrespecting the Hutu people—all because, they say, she was too close and too sympathetic to her sources. “Wrong is hardly the only Africanist who continues to downplay the RPF’s pre-genocide crimes,” they conclude.

Yours truly has a shopping list of criticisms of Do Not Disturb, some very fair, others prolly less so, some might even be downright snotty. ⁴⁶ . (Please revisit fn. 12, above), but I liked the NYRB review The Roots of Rwanda’s Genocide and I liked it a lot, and I told Michela Wrong that. I liked it because it is unprecedented in the annals of the New York Times or mainstream press to see such truths written about Kagame, the RPF, and Rwanda. I also immediately saw the truth in the reviewers’ criticisms. Helen Epstein et al also hen pick a few of Michela Wrong’s comments, flagging her as a closet racist, at best, but these criticisms tend to wrongly exaggerate, in light of the whole.

“Should I have allotted more attention to the RPF atrocities committed specifically between 1990-1994?”  Michela Wrong expresses her frustration. “Probably a few more paragraphs, yes. But there was, as you know, A LOT OF GROUND TO COVER with this story, and my focus was the inner workings of the RPF, the relations between a former band of brothers-turned-enemies” and “[they] accuse me of ignoring context and historical buildup to the genocide, [but] that’s there in my pages—I could quote the page numbers.” ⁴⁷

And it is there. And there was a lot of ground to cover. And she does cover a lot of ground. And it is not, per se, a story about bloody atrocities. While there is some truth to the above reviewers’ claims, their review more poignantly pins their place in the Genocide and Propaganda wars.

Their own review has one glaring problem, and that is the author’s statement that “RPF atrocities committed against the mostly Hutu population of northern Rwanda that have barely been recognized by historians, journalists, and even human rights investigators” … “were methodical but they weren’t genocide.”⁴⁸; ⁴⁹            

Yes, they were. Hutus were enslaved, tortured, raped and killed, en masse, precisely because they were Hutus. It was cold. It was calculated. It was genocide by any reasonable definition of the concept.

“RPF abuses during this period [1990-1994] were largely concealed both by Habyarimana’s totalitarian repression and by the RPF’s nimble propaganda.” Epstein and Gatebuke go on. “Wrong barely mentions them—they merit a single phrase on page 419 of her 488-page book. But they, and the international community’s near-total disregard of them, are what set Rwanda on the path to genocide.” ⁴⁹

One of the establishment press articles of 1994-1998 that supported the RPA/UPDF genocide against the Rwandan Hutu people by universally demonizing them as genocidaires.  Hundreds of thousands of innocent, non-combattant men, women and children were hunted down and slaughtered by the RPA/UPDF forces under the command of Major General Paul Kagame.

Reviewers attacked Michela Wrong on the most spurious grounds. Indeed, the reviewer for Foreign Affairs was so preoccupied with Michela Wrong’s disclosures about Karegeya’s lurid sexual behavior  that it taints his brief review.⁵⁰ British academic Phil Clark distorts the book’s message and its conclusion in a sophisticated masturbatory review where he apparently does not even see the circulatory undermining of his own duplicitous arguments.  ⁵¹ He also resorts to character assassination by sexual innuendo (like Joshua Hammer, he doesn’t grasp the relationship between his own disturbed psyche and what he has written). Male readers will miss it, females less likely to. Phil Clark’s fixation on certain facets of Michela Wrong’s dance with Patrick Karegeya, coupled with his selective tweets of these particular paragraphs, confirm his preoccupation with the notion that Michela Wrong had an affair with Patrick Karegeya. Isn’t that how weak men typically deal with powerful women?

Typical sexualized caricature of white female journalists of the kind routinely published to harass and intimidate Jennifer Fierberg or Ann Garrison. This one appeared in the Rwanda regime’s propaganda venue ‘The Exposer’ run by Tom Ndahiro.

Phil Clark is an academic-in-high-demand paid to testify at U.S. Department of Homeland Security (ICE) removal hearings of Rwandan asylum seekers being hunted by Kagame and his external neutralization and assassinations program.  As Kagame’s most ardent ‘expert’ witness, he collects his fees from Kigali for reports that distort the facts and defame the victims being hunted by the regime.

Phil Clark further stretches credibility when he categorizes Michela Wrong as racist by saying that she “extends an unfortunate Orientalist⁵²  strand that runs through the book.”  Phil Clark’s fervent worship and exotic admiration of King Kagame, coupled with his disingenuous defense of the RPA juggernaut suggest that he might want to look in the lavatory mirror on one of his regular airplane flights in and out of Kigali: a survey of his work reveals that one could hardly be more Orientalist and, anyways, he was long ago criticized by academic peers for his complicity with the regime.⁵³

It’s not everyone who can come and go so freely from Rwanda: one has to be truly $pecial.

Phil Clark is cozy with King Kagame and remains at liberty to roam the Royal Realm far and wide, and he capitalizes on his collusion with little fear and a lot of favor. Ditto Joshua Hammer, Philip Gourevitch, Howard Buffet, Andrew Young, Ben Affleck, Paul Farmer, Rick Warren, and many others whose spit-and-polish perpetuate the King’s grip on the commons.

Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad is a remarkable work by a main stream foreign correspondent with a pedigree d’emploi that deflects the usual accusations meant to discredit and dismiss. Not only that, but Michela Wrong’s sources are often those you wouldn’t expect to see divulging the kinds of secrets they are. That is the book’s greatest currency.

This book is also an archeology of the discourse on Central Afrika, and it challenges the various ideological camps to expand their conceptions of what happened, who done it, where, when and what for. Given Michela Wrong’s stark details and reasonable treatment of material, and her honest admissions of uncertainty, only the most doctrinaire ideologue or bloodthirsty liar or cult-fanatic (e.g. Tom Ndahiro, Phil Clark, Joshua Hammer) will continue to sling around the usual disinformation and conspiracy theories of, for example, the mysterious-plane-crash for the double presidential assassinations or the Tutsis-are-the-Jews of Africa kind. Michela Wrong coolly dispatches some of the usual shibboleths of the standard pro-RPA narrative with little fanfare.

For those who haven’t read it or those sensitive gun-shy souls wary of skeletons jumping out of the pages, Michela Wrong’s Do Not Disturb could rightly be mistaken for an excavation of some really dark material. I mean, really dark, sanguinary heart-of-darkness horror. However, this is not a book to be confused with Judi Rever’s In Praise of Blood: The Crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (2018) which digs deep into the massacre of truth to disinter the stark, ugly, Machiavellian machinations of the Grinding Machine in Rwanda (and the ugly, brutish and short half-life of any public criticisms of it).

The skeletal remains of innocent villagers massacred by Ugandan- and Rwandan-backed militias in the Bogoro massacre in the north of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Photo c. keith harmon snow 2006

Do Not Disturb is non-fiction, it is compelling, it is accessible and, demonstrating the author’s vivacious literary flair and superb storytelling, it might entertain you whether or not you are a snoot ((Refer to the term Snoot as the very same one self-abashedly and self-effacingly and proudly adopted by David Foster Wallace as ‘syntax nudnik of our time’.  See, e.g., Harper’s, April 2001.)) who spends their life pouring over the literature and dissecting reports and confronting facts re: all things Central Afrika. Indeed, whether you are coryphaeus or pupil of the Cult of Elitist Camps of High-Minded Moral Judgers-in-Chief of Events and History in Central Afrika, or a lay Gourevitchist of the New Yorker-over-breakfast kind of infotainment, Do Not Disturb might either shock your sensibilities awake or yawningly confirm your already petrified prejudices, no matter in which muddy camp you stake your genocide flag.

The beauty of it is that you might not need to read any preparatory material to navigate this book or the author’s lines of enquiry—as long as you remember that Michela Wrong isn’t right about everything. She lays some nice groundwork, though, enough to gain a fair, reasonable, accurate portrait of the nastiness and horror of the regime we (sic) keep in power.

The ugly of it is that you probably watched Hotel Rwanda and thought it was true, or you read We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With our Families and thought that was true, and you probably have not read The Falsification of Afrikan Consciousness or even heard of its author Dr. Amos Wilson,⁵⁴ which all in all translates to: you have a serious Problem (capital ‘P’).

Q:  Why?

A:  See Ellul.⁵⁵

Do Not Disturb is also brimming with intrigue and shocking revelations that might provoke a shiver of shame from those who for years have seen only fashion in the foibles of Kigali’s naked King and polished the image of the King’s Court in exchange for, well, diamonds and gold and columbium-tantalite, and access to presidents and Swiss bank accounts, or merely for a pinprick of power, or for a sprawling villa on Rwanda’s more remote volcano lakes, or for nubile pubescent virgin females. You know, for some or all of the perks that people sell their souls for.

Given the Pandoran-scale plunder of the Great Lakes of Afrika, where all the usual metals comprising whole rows and columns of the Periodic Table ⁵⁶ are extracted, where Cobalt and Nickel and Uranium oxides (and their actinide  ⁵⁷ derivatives) are distilled out of Congo for an arsenal of western Fat Men and Little Boys ((The uranium-oxide ore (pitchblende) used to build the first atomic bombs (under the top secret Manhattan Project) was mined at the Shinkolobwe uranium mine in what was then known as the Belgian Congo. In 1940, 1,200 tons of ore were shipped to the US by Edgar Sengier’s African Metals Corp., a commercial arm of Belgium’s Union Miniere de Haut Katanga. The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Japan) were named Fat Man and Little Boy, respectively, because they were of the two distinct atomic weapon designs developed under those names.)), as are heaps of odd elements for applications that yours truly and most of the hoi polloi have never even heard of,⁵⁸ any expectation of sudden moral clarity is dubious at best, the flashy crocodile-tear promotionalizing of Elon Musk⁵⁹ and his crystal adventures⁶⁰ in Congo notwithstanding.

Now, let’s consider for a moment that Paul Kagame, Rwanda’s stick-figure leader supreme should perhaps have been recruited by some pro-basketball team, where the Cs and Ds on his General Ed Certificate and his oft-chronicled habit of spying on and Ratting Out fellow students and comrades-in-arms  ⁶¹ were overlooked. Instead we have this tall lanky (a.k.a. toothpicky) guy who ended up in press-ganged new camo fatigues and cold blue metal Ak-47 dribbling blood on the front lines of several coups d’etat and who deftly out-maneuvered both the Court of Public Opinion and the International Court of Justice that indicted 40 of his subordinate officers (including ‘the General’ Nyamwasa of Michela’s Wrong’s chronicle). ⁶² Heads of state and Toothpick Kings, it seems, automatically get a pass for such trifling misdemeanors as war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, but when the top-tier credentialed journalists and human rights defenders are camped out safely behind your lines, you can definitively count on their fealty. That, at least, is what King Kagame did.

This was another coup d’etat for the Toothpick King. We can hold up Joshua Hammer as a shining example (in the Nicholsonian sense of shining).⁶³

“Western reporters fresh to Kigali wrote admiring articles so similar they could almost have been photocopied.”⁶⁴  Michela Wrong frequently assaults her own naivete and the lackluster due diligence of her particular species—the many foreign correspondents who serve the propaganda establishment. But, I already said this. But, it’s worth hammering home because her revelations are sincere and refreshing. She recounts testimonies declaring “‘[a]pproved’ journalists were taken to the massacre sites like tourists and helped to file their stories. The [Rwandan Patriotic Front] were smarter and better resourced than the journalists they were dealing with. They gave us transport, food, and protection, they told us a story, and we relayed it. In a way, we were public relations officers, not journalists.”⁶⁵

“The General” Kayumba Nyamwasa of the Rwandan Patriotic Army

British journo Michela Wrong was on the ground in Afrique Centrale around the same time as the NYT’s Howard French and Newsweek’s Josh Hammer, and they all put out their own unique portraits of the horror, the horror, manufactured by Kagame and Museveni (and their backers). Now, 27 years later, at 488 pages, Michela Wrong’s is one of few accountings that genuinely exalts the nakedness of the King and what she has created is a masterpiece of organization, with plenty of intrigue and a lot of style.

Michela Wrong never bludgeons you, reader, with a barrage of bodies or skeletons like someone of the human-rights-crusader kind where, as she told me, “[r]eading feels like an ordeal, a form of mental torture, about as much fun as a dose of food poisoning… where violence described is so extreme and unrelenting, so apparently gratuitous, that the temptation is simply to close the book and stop reading.” ⁶⁶

Alas, in your foreign correspondent’s humble opinion, her book has its faults. Her descriptions and assessment of Ugandan president Milton Obote is lousy, far off the mark, and her treatment of Yoweri Museveni is not much better, but this is due to her overreliance on the Tutsis who animate her story: The former is always the devil and the latter indecisively divine.

While footnoting Milton Obote’s Notes on the Concealment of Genocide, for example, her treatment of the atrocities in Uganda’s Luwero Triangle during Museveni’s ‘Bush war’ is decidedly coated with RPF drool. Appreciating the potential for Obote’s own biases to overwhelm the truth, we can nonetheless find in Notes an accounting of the atrocities committed by Yoweri Museveni and his National Resistance Army, a guerrilla insurgency with its vengeful Tutsi vanguard—the same Paul Kagame and James Kabarebe and ‘the General’ Kayumba Nyamwasa whose long march to infamy terminated uncountable lives—and the tactics they used then as now.

“There has not been a more progressive and least bigoted Administration in Uganda’s history than the first Obote administration.” Professor Amii Amara-Otunnu, a Ugandan, confers. “Congolese, Rwandese and Sudanese were all welcome to Uganda and most of them were afforded citizenship. Of course, we now know that Museveni dictatorship is the worst and most diabolical Administration in Uganda’s history.”⁶⁷

The whole problematic narrative of the ‘liberation’ of Uganda by Yoweri Museveni and the National Resistance Army (NRA),⁶⁸ with the Banyarwanda⁶⁹  Tutsis—Paul Kagame and Fred Rwigyema and Patrick Karegeya and Kayumba Nyamwasa—by his side, sets the stage for the whole twisted problematic narrative of the ‘liberation’ of Rwanda by the RPA/F. We hear these guys Karegeya and ‘The General’ espousing their versions of history and the Tutsis are always the victims and its rather insufferable, and the author let them go on.

These elite Tutsis love their vicarious victims’ tales.

No matter.  Every now and again they bubble up something truly revealing.

Michela Wrong makes it clear up front that her sources are inveterate liars and blood-thirsty killers. Here again she connects the pre-colonial past of the Tutsi Toothpick Kings and their culture of lying (Ubwenge) to the post-colonial, post-Habyarimana present and King Kagame’s lies of the times.

Reader beware.

The Winter of Africa’s Discontent

The book has one major ideological flaw, and although it is not fatal, this flaw must be appreciated, no matter that is it peripheral to the overall achievement, and that is the author’s contribution to the perpetuation of the Tutsi supremacy ideology and the mythology that so many scholars and journalists and human rights activists and other Rwanda ‘experts’ mistakenly, foolishly, callously, ignorantly or blindly adhere to. The ideological roots of this Tutsi supremacy underpin and inform most all scholarship that relies/d on the fabricated and falsified historiography to enable and facilitate the deep-seated RPA/F narrative and, consequently, all their actions. As I previously mentioned, Michela Wrong’s treatment of the historiography of the Banyarwanda (Tutsis, Hutus, refugees, settlers) in Uganda is skewed by her reading, and adoption, of establishment prejudices and mythologies that pervade the literature and distort the entire gestalt re: all things Rwanda.

Through the vehicle of Do Not Disturb, what we see in Michela Wrong is an example of the self-reflective, self-directed process of the decolonization of the mind (hers). She admits to her having been duped by the RPA/F and its Rwandan and Ugandan agents. Slow in the uptake,⁷⁰ it took some 20 years for the façade to crack and fully expose the nakedness of the Emperor.  She described herself as one who “had seen the RPF as implacable, certainly, but a disciplined, highly effective movement with a farsighted leadership and a progressive agenda, felt our certainties begin to tremble. I didn’t want to confront the truth of just how thoroughly I might have got it wrong.”⁷¹

Having ‘got it wrong’, and no matter her humility and sincerity in admitting the error, on some details Michela Wrong continues to get it wrong, only a skip and a jump off the mainstream establishment path. On page 119, for example, she cites “British journalist Cathy Watson, who wrote one of the best reports on the topic” of the Banyarwanda in Uganda.  Who is this Cathy Watson and what is this report and why does it matter?

Published February 1991, only months after the RPA’s invasion of Rwanda from Uganda, Exile from Rwanda: Background to an Invasion is a 20-page ‘Issue Paper’ published under the trademark of the euphemistically named ‘U.S. Committee for Refugees’—a highly specious front organization serving overt and covert U.S. interests—that funded and disseminated Watson’s ‘research’. The paper is copyrighted, however, by the equally nebulous, secretive, nationalist American Council for Nationalities Service.

Roger Winter, the head of the U.S. Committee for Refugees (USCR), was the kingpin behind Washington-backed guerrilla insurgencies in Congo, Rwanda, Sudan and Uganda. In 1988, Roger Winter organized a conference for Tutsis in the diaspora, held in the U.S. and funded by the USCR, where RPA cadres openly declared their intentions to resume the armed struggle to ‘liberate’ Rwanda (read: to recover the power lost in 1959 and reinstate the Tutsi-supremacist aristocracy and do so by any means necessary).⁷² Roger Winter was in the field behind RPA lines during the civil war in Rwanda 1990-1994, and this is the reason he was pinned with several medals by King Kagame.

Roger Winter’s protégés included U.S. National Security operatives Susan Rice, Gayle Smith, Jendayi Frazer, John Prendergast and Ted Gagne, and Roger Winter and USCR constantly trotted out RPA propagandists, including Alison Des Forges ⁷³ and Catherine Watson, and disseminated their work, serving a very partisan and specious interventionist agenda. Another agent in the RPA arsenal was Monique Mujawamariwa, seconded to Roger Winter by RPF high command. She was launched on speaking tours by Roger Winter which culminated into an audience in the White House on April 22, 1994 with Mr. Anthony Lake, National Security Advisor to President William Jefferson Clinton.⁷⁴

Michela Wrong never mentions Roger Winter, or the USCR. In a short discussion of the smooth-talking, self-laudatory comments by Theogene Rudasingwa, another former RPF operative now in exile, she does introduce several of Roger Winter’s protégés through the mouthpiece of another RPF defector. Theogene Rudasingwa brags “with a rueful laugh”—Michela Wrong wrote—about deceiving foreign officials, journalists, intelligence agents and press, and he even claims ownership of the mythology that the RPF had heroically intervened to stop a genocide started by Hutu extremists who had killed their own president. “I was a very effective salesman of that [RPA] narrative. I charmed them all.”⁷⁵

“When the time came to justify breaking up the [mostly Hutu] refugee camps in Zaire, while adamantly denying Rwandan involvement, [Rudasingwa] did that, too, although there was always a nudge-nudge wink-wink quality to those conversations.” Quoting Rudasingwa again: “There was a kind of unspoken understanding among the people I dealt with, like Susan Rice, Gayle Smith, John Prendergast, Ted Dagne, that we all knew what the truth was.” ⁷⁵

These are the foreign operatives euphemistically described as ‘policy wonks’ in a mainstream establishment whitewash lauding their interventionist adventurism in Sudan.⁷⁶  Michela Wrong’s excavation of the admissions above are really an indictment of Roger Winter and his protégés, their complicity with terrorists, and the entire corrupt enterprise. Her presentation is subtle, indirect, but unmistakably incriminating.

Ugandan expert Remingius Kintu is adamant. “The U.S. Committee for Refugees Inc. (sic),” run by Roger Winter, “became a virtual command post for RPF external operations: logistical management, disinformation propaganda, psychological operations and other political intelligence activities for RPF with almost unlimited funds from dubious sources in the USA.” ⁷⁷

There’s so much more. Catherine Watson was married to Yoweri Museveni’s chief hired gun, William Pike, the ‘journalist’ turned editor of the New Vision newspaper, Museveni’s state mouthpiece. Pike’s Combatants: A Memoir of the Bush War and the Press in Uganda ((William Pike, Combatants: A Memoir of the Bush War and the Press in Uganda, self-published, 2019.)) is a propaganda whitewash of the National Resistance Army (NRA) and, later, of RPA crimes. William Pike burst onto the international media scene through big British media with the first boots-on-the-ground accounts ‘from the bush’ portraying Museveni and the NRA as Marxist liberation heroes in a biblical contest with the evil Obote regime. Combatants is really a rather shocking but vacuous self-delusional disinformation memoir, packed with bias(es) and unsubstantiated claims echoing the supremacist Tutsi line, that falsifies and subverts the entire historiography of the NRA insurgency 1980-1985, and of the state-sponsored terrorism in the years that followed, 1986-1995.⁷⁸

President Paul Kagame pins a medal on the chest of U.S. covert operative Roger Winter at a special celebration in Rwanda July 2010. Winter was honored with Rwanda’s URUTI National Liberation Medal and UMURINZI Campaign Against Genocide Medal.

“Working with the National Resistance Movement as a journalist,” wrote William Pike, “gave me a real sense—which I never had in the [British] Labour Party—that I was an active participant in a historic movement that was changing the world for the better.” ⁷⁹ William Pike was embedded with the NRA and he idolized Yoweri Museveni.

Catherine Watson’s report mirrors the slant and framing of her husband’s Combatants, only she focuses exclusively on the Tutsi ‘refugees’ proclaiming them a “stateless and spiritually homeless” people. It is an essentialized, manipulative, biased account, replete with half-truths and bald-faced lies, that ignores the extremist supremacy of the Tutsi aristocrats-in-exile (an ‘exile’ which many themselves chose, by the way), the extremist Tutsi ideology and the terrorism committed in its name, and the hysterically vengeful intent of Tutsi supremacists to revenge and commit genocide against Hutus and punish the Tutsis who chose to remain in Rwanda after the first years of the independence struggle. It also completely erases NRA responsibility for atrocities in Uganda. As apologists who whitewashed NRA and RPA terrorism—including war crimes and crimes against humanity—Catherine Watson and William Pike (like so many others) helped set the stage for genocide.⁸⁰; ⁸¹

Exile from Rwanda is a racist, anti-Hutu, anti-Obote, pro-RPA propaganda tract, and it is consistent with much pro-Tutsi supremacist scholarship that both preceded and followed it. It gained a lot of currency because, at the time, it was the only publication of its kind, and it still is. Backing the RPA guerrillas, factions of the U.S. and U.K. power elite ate it up and regurgitated it, favorably. Catherine Watson’s association with William Pike, and their mutual insider status with Museveni, the NRA, the RPA and all the Ugandan Tutsi leaders were not disclosed.⁸⁰

You [Roger Winter] also generously provided facilities for members of the RPF
in the United States to meet and disseminate much needed information.
(From: Citations to 2010 Medal Recipients, Rwanda New Times, July 05, 2010)

Michela Wrong’s historiography of the pre-colonial era and references to the Royal vocabulary are mildly problematic, but peripheral to the focus of her book. The rise and shine of the inglorious Intore are appropriately flagged but she renews the frenzy over the Inyenzi. These Kinyarwanda terms bespeak the institutions of hegemony and hegemonic relations that obtained between Tutsi elites, their Twa shock troops, and the Hutu masses. The Toothpick King and his Cockroach Court have restored the Intore for their own nefarious glory, as Michela Wrong aptly notes, but the scampering scurrilous cockroach epithet—the whole nasty Inyenzi thing—has yet to be dragged into the light and unceremoniously squashed. ⁸²

The extremist Tutsi guerrillas of the 1960s called themselves Inyenzi and there is a deep historiography of elite Tutsi terrorism behind the term Inyenzi that was NOT coined by the Hutu intelligencia or the Habyarimana propaganda system or by ‘Hutu Power’ (another racially distorted terminology used in the arsenal of slanders to dehumanize Hutu leaders and, by default, all Hutu people) as universally and disingenuously claimed by so much of the pro-RPA propaganda and adherents like Joshua Hammer and Phil Clark.⁴¹  ‘Cockroach’ was not the sole Kinyarwanda derivation of Inyenzi that led to its adoption by Tutsi guerillas.

Oh, oh, oh!  How the hydra of Tutsi supremacy rears its ugly head again and again! Michela Wrong utilizes sources like the French  journalist Gerard Prunier, a close RPA confidant whose first book The Rwanda Crises: History of a Genocide (Columbia, 1995) is a distortion of history and apologia of RPA crimes, even if his position changed somewhat, out of favor with King Kagame, later. There are ideas and whole sections in Do Not Disturb that mirror so many erroneous accounts—like Prunier’s and William Pike’s⁷⁹ and, even the most erudite, like Mahmood Mamdani’s ⁸³  that downplay or entirely mischaracterize the violent Tutsi guerrilla terrorism waged against countrymen emerging from colonialism and hundreds of years of aristocratic Tutsi oppression and brutality. William Pike and Mahmood Mamdani were the peels protecting the NRA and RPA bananas; each nurtured the propaganda campaigns and psychological operations that whitewashed the NRM and RPA insurgencies and protected leaders like Yoweri Museveni, Paul Kagame, Fred Rwigyema, Patrick Karegeya, Kayumba Nyamwasa and all the rest. Meanwhile, against the NRM and RPA enemies, these propaganda agents advanced unsupported fabrications, perpetuated claims about false flag operations, and regurgitated other unfounded accusations.

Is Michela Wrong sympathetic to the King’s henchmen? To the generals and spy chiefs? To the body-burners and trigger-pullers and hoe-swingers? The propagandists and whisperers of life-ending rumors?  The Colonel Karegeyas and General Nyamwasas and repentant Rudasingwas ⁸⁴ that made King Kagame what he is and then ran for their lives like every dog who was ever undeservingly kicked by his mean-spirited master?

“To these men who no doubt ended up doing dreadful things? I sure was.” Michela Wrong stakes her flag in the moral high ground of reality. “I’m a firm believer in the notion that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. The challenge was to get the reader interested in these characters in the first place, then nuance and qualify that assessment as the story goes on and we learn more about their personal itineraries. No one reads a book in which every single character is a psychotic bastard, from the get-go through to the end, because that’s not the world we know or live in. We live in a world where impish charmers do dreadful things and murderers love their children.”⁸⁵

There are other problems with the book: absurd tributes to fallen RPA ‘heroes’, some slippery analyses here and there, a few sycophantic accolades to real bastards, some genuinely wrong stuff, and some ‘expert’ from the Cult of Elitist Camps of All Things Central Afrika will likely sort these out. And maybe no one ever will.

Take page 302, for example. Here we meet Rick Orth, “who as U.S. defense attaché in Kigali witnessed the General [Kayumba] in action at close hand.” I bet he did. And that’s just it: Michela Wrong offers a few insights into Orth’s deep relationship to the RPA Grinding Machine. Orth’s comment’s are self-incriminating. He was no ordinary bystander to genocide. It will be decades before the classified papers are released, if ever.

Do Not Disturb is not much of a cover-up, though perhaps a little self-censoring whitewash—everyone does that, your humble correspondent included—and maybe even more than a little. Only Michela Wrong can answer to that. What we don’t yet know, on the other hand, we don’t yet know. It’s hard to know what someone knows, and what they don’t, or why they make the choices they make. Assumptions and arrogance go hand in hand. It disappoints me that she repeats so much of the nonsense put out by key ‘sources’ for so many years, ad nauseum, and that she obviously believes what she wrote.⁸⁶ There are a few names dropped throughout the text, and even some quotes from some really sly dogs, who are never challenged, but who instead sing out as voices of authority. And that leads to my biggest criticism: where are all the white war collar criminals behind the black Afrikan warlords? What about the nefarious Soldiers of mis-Fortune? The gun-runners and profiteers? The Diamond kingpins? Tony Buckingham and Tim Spicer and all these other Gucci mercenaries?

When it comes to writing about Central Afrika, that is some of the difference between Michela Wrong and Helen Epstein.⁸⁷ We know, for example, that Rowland ‘Tiny’ Rowland backed Yoweri Museveni’s war machine in Uganda (even if it’s not clear to everyone when this began): that’s the kind of thing Helen Epstein might tell us (and she does). What about British American Tobacco? Unilever? And where are the oil companies in these accounts? ⁸⁸ 

As any real journalist knows, the ‘protection’ of sources is both blessing and curse. Quoting an unnamed South African security expert about the execution of Patrick Karegeya, she does reveal that “the formative influence on Rwandan intelligence is Mossad and this was standard Israeli MO.”⁸⁹ Now, that’s something. Of course, for journalists, there is always this question of access. Who are all these people attached to some 73 citations credited to: “Author’s interview, anonymity requested”?

No matter. The book’s meritorious contents outweigh its deleterious discontents. Sure you might wonder why a line of inquiry is suddenly killed dead, what deeper currents some innuendo swirls, who pulls the strings of the obvious puppets. There’s a lot that isn’t in this book, and that’s more than O.K., it was necessity.

Leave it. The author has done a superb job (my criticisms notwithstanding). She’s been threatened, ridiculed, everything but hunted in the ways the Toothpick King hunts and silences people. I mean, at least they haven’t pulled a Rusesabagina on her—drugged and abducted, hauled to Rwanda, tortured, tried as a terrorist in King Kagame’s kangaroo courts, her kind character and professionalism pilloried by the weasely Joshua Hammer wielding the New York Times brand over the court of public opinion. I suppose there’s still time, but the damage is done. The book is out and it’s perfect.

They have already labeled Michela Wrong a genocide denier and, dealing with King Kagame, this is a badge of achievement. Now she’s the target of sexual taunting—repeated tweets by Rwanda’s Service of Subversion and Shame (pretending to be ordinary tweeters) echoing the claim she was Patrick Karegeya’s lover, you know, five times a day, for months, again and again, and the recent twist, claiming that she is Yoweri Museveni’s whore. We have seen the same lurid childish sexist treatment served on other female journalists who have had the audacity to challenge the Rwanda story.⁹⁰ Isn’t that what it always comes down to with intelligent, powerful women and especially for women who stand up to power?

Nothing original about any of these guys. What is original is Michela Wrong’s telling of the untold tale and her documentation of the casual admissions of dreadful deeds of RPA dissidents. Here is a woman who has shown real courage, and she’s given the world a prize and Do Not Disturb is far more deserving than most Pulitzer recipients.

Rwanda is not defined by a geographical space; it is a state of mind. ⁹¹

War is peace. Victims will be killers, and killers will be victims, but the lions have yet to tell the story of the hunt. The RPA won the war. They were backed by the USA, UK, Canada, and Israel. The RPA narrative is the establishment narrative. Michela Wrong offers us the voices of some of the most notorious victors.

Maybe you will suck at your teeth, clench your martini, tear a few pages in the anxiety of turning them, wake your lover out of a dead sleep in the excitement of some twisted or phantasmagorical revelation, and maybe that’s not you, but the story will carry you through even the miscellaneous dulls on the wind of its authors’ humility and derring-do. It’s written fairly well. You will even find sentences that strike at the banal absurdity of it all, like the last one below.

“During these sessions, Patrick [Karegeya] never exposed his hand, teasing his new acquaintances instead with what he could tell them but somehow never did. The chat was gossipy and inconsequential—what was going on in the White House, Clinton’s sexual misdemeanors—seasoned with the kind of gynecological jokes that are a Ugandan specialty.” ⁹²;⁸⁵

And you might just laugh out loud.

• First published at Keith Harmon Snow’s website

1. The word ‘notorious’ is neutral, though its interpretation is usually colored by the presumption of a pejorative connotation
2. Michela Wrong, Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad, PublicAffairs, 2021: p. 77.
3. When I worked in Kisangani (DRC) in 2004, I learned from an expat European how the RPA commandeered his big excavating and logging machines to disappear the bodies of thousands of innocent Hutu men, women and children slaughtered by the RPA and UPDF with cold, wicked, calculated, pathological cruelty. See, e.g.: Kisangani Diaries, a short film by Hubert Sauper.
4. When British jurnalist Nik Jones reported the crematoriums, no one believed it: they still don’t.
5. Michela Wrong, Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad, PublicAffairs, 2021: p. 57.
6. In a 2007 interview conducted with your foreign correspondent, Paul Rusesabagina, the real life hero of the Hotel Rwanda story, described the regime of Paul Kagame as a “Grinding Machine”: “a machine grinding human beings.”
7. Private communication, October 2021.
8. Michela Wrong, In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in Mobutu’s Congo, Harper Perennial, 2002.
9. This is a reference to the BBC documentary “Rwanda’s Untold Story,” broadcast 1 October 2014, a documentary based on multiple individuals’ persistent reportage, including my own, contrarian to the falsification of consciousness inculcated through the mainstream establishment narrative.
10. Veteran journalist Stephen Kinzer authored the pathologically problematic hagiography of Paul Kagame titled: A Thousand Hills: Rwanda’s Rebirth and the Man Who Dreamed It.
11. The Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) is the armed wing of the Ugandan forces comprised mostly of Tutsis who invaded Rwanda in October 1990 and fought the civil war to seize power absolutely in July 1994.  The Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) is the name of the political wing of the RPA. The two names are often loosely interchanged with no loss of meaning or accuracy.
12. Your humble correspondent counts himself amongst them, though he also counts himself Survivor-in-Recovery of the Cult of Elitist Camps of High-Minded Moral Judgers-in-Chief of Events and History in Central Africa.
13. Afrika spelled with a ‘K’: According to the Afrikan-American poet and writer Haki Madhubuti in his From Plan to Planet (1973), there are basically four reasons to spell Afrika with a ‘K’. Please see: Keith Harmon Snow, “Tutsi Hegemony: Genocide in Rwanda” (part II), garrison: The Journal of History and Deep Politics, Issue 002, July/August 2019: sidebar.
14. Joshua Hammer, “He Was the Hero of ‘Hotel Rwanda.’ Now He’s Accused of Terrorism.” New York Times Magazine, March 2, 2021.  See, e.g., the letter from Professor Brian Endless—who was one of the many sources misquoted in the story—to the editors of the New York Times Magazine.
15. For those who seek hard proof, it is easy to demonstrate the extreme bias of Tom Ndahiro, who cherry-picks his sources and facts, lacing his scholarship with demagoguery. See, for example, Ndahiro’s selective and miscontextualized presentation of a letter written 25 January 1960 by Bishop Bigirumwami in Ndahiro’s chapter contribution “The Church’s Bling Eye to Genocide in Rwanda,” in Genocide in Rwanda: Complicity of the Churches? (Rittner, Roth & Whitworth eds., Aegis Trust, 2004, p. 229). Ndahiro presents Bigirumwami as a voice of reason speaking out against hate, which is always attributed to Hutus. (Ndahiro’s further attention to Bigirumwami is so distorted as to be too insufferable to unpack). The true ideological and political position of Bishop Bigirumwami, in its proper historical and political context, is properly situated and detailed in Ian Linden’s important work Church and Revolution in Rwanda which, of course, Ndahiro never mentions. Indeed, Bishop Aloys Bigirumwami, Linden informs, was born into the Gisaka royal lineage, and his name meant “‘All things belong to the mwami’ a prudent choice by the Gisaka Royal line.” He was, in fact, an adherent of the aristocratic Tutsi supremacy. In the tumultuous period of Rwanda’s independence struggle, Bishop Bigirumwami leaned into a conservative monarchist position, vacillating in his support of the Tutsi Union Nationale Rwandais (UNAR) nationalists, the political backbone of the Tutsi aristocracy’s guerrilla terrorist Inyenzi insurgency, but eventually swung fully into the conservative Tutsi nationalist (UNAR) camp. Ian Linden, Church and Revolution in Rwanda, Manchester University Press, 1977: pages 153, 244 n. 89, 269.
16. It’s also easy to excavate Tom Ndahiro’s vitriolic disingenuous name-calling ad hominem attacks, on-line, published against the regime’s perceived enemies, including your humble correspondent. See, e.g. Tom Ndahiro, “Keith Harmon Snow, A Prototype Virulent Tutsi and Jews Hater who Inspired BBC’s Untold Story,” umuvugizi, 24 October 2014.
17. Michela Wrong, Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad, PublicAffairs, 2021.
18. Michela Wrong, Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad, PublicAffairs, 2021: 436.
19. If the reader is unfamiliar, this is a satire of the ‘devastating phrase’ Q. And babies? A. And babies’ that appeared 1970, printed in red over an original photograph of the 1968 Mai Lai massacre taken at the scene by army photographer Ron Haeberle. The phrase ​came from a news interview with soldier Paul Meadlo, who had participated in the slaughter. Designed by artist-activists Irving Petlin, Jon Hendricks, and Frazer Dougherty, the offset lithograph poster is currently part of the permanent collection at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
20. RPA General James Kabarebe is pivotal to the perpetual plunder, extortion, human trafficking, war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in eastern Congo. At one point Kabarebe was one of the primary agents overseeing the RPA’s infamous ‘Congo Desk’ and he was named in the United Nations’ Report of the Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, S/2001/357, 12 April 2001.
21. Author of King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa, Houghton Mifflin, 1998.
22. This is the ‘spirit’ elucidated by David Foster Wallace in his “Tense Present,” Harper’s Magazine, April 2001.
23. Howard W. French, “The Dark Underside of Rwanda’s Model Public Image,” New York Times, March 30, 2021.
24. Let it be known that your humble correspondent once many years ago interviewed Howard W. French and—fair or unfair—has been less than humble in his critiques of Mr. French’s reportage.
25. ilip Reyntjens, The RPF did it. A fresh look at the 1994 plane attack that ignited genocide in Rwanda, Working Paper, ISSN 2294-8643, May 2020.
26. See chapter seven, ‘Where Peacocks Roam,’ in Howard W. French, A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa, Vintage, 2005.
27. That is a rhetorical question that I could but won’t be answering here.
28. The decolonization of the Western Mind is no trifle: off with our heads.
29. Lawrence ‘Larry’ Devlin definitively was a spook. See, e.g., Michela Wrong, In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in Mobutu’s Congo, Harper Perennial, 2002; Lawrence Devlin, Chief of Station, Congo: Fighting the Cold War in a Hot Zone, PublicAffairs, 2008; and, especially, David N. Gibbs, The Political Economy of Third World Intervention, University of Chicago Press, 1991.
30. Howard W. French, “The Dark Underside of Rwanda’s Model Public Image,” New York Times, March 30, 2021.
31. Paul Rusesabagina & Tom Zoellner, An Ordinary Man: An Autobiography, Penguin, 2007.
32. Joshua Hammer, “I’ve Lost Nearly Everyone,” Newsweek, April 24, 1994; and: Joshua Hammer, “The Killing Fields,” Newsweek, 22 May 1994.
33. The italics were inserted by your humble correspondent. Please note that Joshua Hammer bracketed kidnapped in quotes, which is by itself a red flag on Hammer’s veracity: he diminished and dismissed the kidnapping, which has been justified by the principle mala captus bene detentus (wrongfully caught, legally detained), but which brings into disrepute the administration of justice, encourages lawlessness, violates state sovereignty, disregards international human rights law, and undermines the international extradition network.
34. One of the most entrenched and cultist Camps in the Genocide wars has its genesis in the Rwanda reportage of Philip Gourevitch, a regular columnist for the New Yorker magazine since 1995, and a close confidante of Paul Kagame who also had rather intriguing insider connections to the administration of William Jefferson Clinton and whose expositions on Rwanda—the latest of which appeared 14 April 2014—eventually came under rather sharp criticism even by some of the former adherents of Gourevitchism.
35. Brian Endless goes on: “According to Quora and many other sources: the word ‘hack’ refers to someone who is disreputable, unreliable, or mediocre; it can also refer to a partisan who only cares about their group or their political party.”
36. See: letter to the New York Times from Brian Endless, who is one of many sources quoted out of context in Hammer’s article.
37. Judi Rever, “An intimate, one-sided view of Paul Kagame’s Rwanda in a journal of record,” Judi Rever website, 10 March 2021.
38. Michela Wrong, Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad, PublicAffairs, 2021: p. 437.
39. Joshua Hammer, “The Epic Hunt for One of the World’s Most Wanted Men,” GQ, 19 January 2021.
40. Judi Rever, In Praise of Blood: The Crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, Random House Canada, 2018.
41. See: Keith Harmon Snow: “Genocide in Rwanda” (part I), garrison: The Journal of History and Deep Politics, Issue 001, April/May 2019; “Tutsi Hegemony: Genocide in Rwanda” (part II), garrison: The Journal of History and Deep Politics, Issue 002, July/August 2019; and “Rwanda’s Technicians of Death: Genocide in Rwanda” (part III), garrison: The Journal of History and Deep Politics, Issue 003, October/November 2019.
42. “Rwanda’s Rusesabagina is Guilty as Charged—Analyst,” Africanews with AFP, September 2021:
43. Michela Wrong, Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad, PublicAffairs, 2021: 250.
44. Michela Wrong, Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad, PublicAffairs, 2021: 6-7.
45. Helen Epstein and Claude Gatebuke, “The Roots of Rwanda’s Genocide,” The New York Review of Books, June 10, 2021.
46. Not to be confused with snooty (see fn. 63 below.
47. Personal communication with the author, July 2021.
48. Phew! Barely escaped that one: I began writing about RPA atrocities against Hutus almost 20 years ago.
49. Helen Epstein and Claude Gatebuke, “The Roots of Rwanda’s Genocide,” New York Review of Books, 10 June 2021: p. 37.
50. Phil Clark, “The Two Rwandas: Development and Dissent Under Kagame,” Foreign Affairs, May/June 2021.
51. Your humble correspondent’s prejudices due to his personal encounters with Phil Clark, in courts of law where we appeared as expert witnesses on opposing sides, over-ride all pretense of honoring the democratic premise elucidated above.
52. Edward W. Said, Orientalism, Vintage, 1979.
53. See, e.g., the extensive back and forth between Phil Clark and Dr. Susan Thomson, here.
54. Dr. Amos Wilson, The Falsification of Afrikan Consciousness, Afrikan World Infosystems, July 1993.
55. See: Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, 1963.
56. To wit: Row 2, Cols. Ia & IIa; Row 4; Row 5; excluding the Diatomic and Polyatomic non-metals, the Noble gases and most of the s-block elements.
57. The actinides comprise Row 6, Column IIIa of the Periodic Table; more precisely, Googled: “any of the series of fifteen metallic elements from actinium (atomic number 89) to lawrencium (atomic number 103) in the periodic table. They are all radioactive, the heavier members being extremely unstable and not of natural occurrence.”
58. E.g.: Praseodymium and terbium and dysprosium and most all of the lantinoids of Row 5, Column IIIa of the Periodic Table; more precisely, Wikipedia’d: The lanthanide or lanthanoid series of chemical elements comprises the 15 metallic chemical elements with atomic numbers 57–71, from lanthanum through lutetium. These elements, along with the chemically similar elements scandium and yttrium, are often collectively known as the rare-earth elements.
59. Elon Musk has had a lot to say about how the raw materials for his Tesla production lines—extracted from Congo—come from ‘clean’ and unbloodied and conflict-free sources. It’s all rubbish.
60. Crystal Ventures is the current name of the Sogo Shosha-size holding company set up and run by Patrick Karegeya, Paul Kagame, James Kabarebe, and other Rwandan Patriotic Army commanders who ran the shadow organization behind the public façade of government in Rwanda and the legendary ‘Congo Desk’ in eastern Congo. The company was set up in 1995 under the name Tri-Star Investments, but was rebranded in 2009 after being named in connection with diverse crimes (e.g. racketeering, forced labor, extortion, abductions, & etc.) in the United Nations’ Report of the Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, S/2001/357, 12 April 2001: paragraphs 82 & 86.
61. Kagame was most trusted of all by supreme commander Yoweri Museveni during the ‘bush war’ in Uganda precisely because of his perverse talents at spying and reporting on comrade soldiers of the National Resistance Army.
62. International Court of Justice, Audiencia Nacionale, Madrid, Spain. On 6 February 2008, Andreu Merelles, Investigative Judge of the Spanish Audiencia Nacional, issued a 180-page indictment, charging 40 current or former high-ranking Rwandan military officials of the Rwandan Defense Forces (RDF) and allied military groups with many crimes including genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and terrorism.
63. A.k.a., Jack Nicholson, the horror, the horror, in The Shining.
64. Michela Wrong, Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad, PublicAffairs, 2021: p. 389.
65. Michela Wrong, Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad, PublicAffairs, 2021: p. 264.
66. Personal communication, 21 June 2021.
67. Private communicate, June 2021.
68. As with RPA and RPF, the terms ‘National Resistance Army’ (NRA) and ‘National Resistance Movement’ (NRM)—the army’s political wing—are interchangeably used herein.
69. The term ‘Banyarwanda’ is itself a floating nebulous term depending on the area that is being written about or discussed (e.g. eastern Congo, Uganda, Rwanda, Tanzania or Burundi) and the author or speaker’s understanding or definition (and hence, usage) of the term. E.g. Banyarwanda in Uganda included former Rwandan’s who identified as Hutu and those who identified as Tutsi.
70. The decolonization of the mind is not an easy process, but rather a slow, churning, disorienting process where two steps forward are followed by three steps backward; where some overall forward progression is only achieved by the lucky, persistent, self-critical ones who are devoted to truth; with a high rate of recidivism for all; and failure for the majority, leading these to a state of apathy, indifference, denial, and sometimes a violent and active resistance to the truth.
71. What a courageous public admission, and unprecedented in the annals of the mainstream media.
72. See: Keith Harmon Snow, “Special Report: Exposing U.S. Agents of Low Intensity Warfare in Africa: The ‘Policy Wonks’ behind Covert Warfare and Humanitarian Fascism,” Dissident Voice, 9 September 2012.
73. A noted Rwanda expert, Alison Des Forges served as a USAID consultant and researcher for Human Rights Watch. While it is true that Des Forges eventually fell out of favor with the Kagame regime, this does not negate her earlier role as an RPA propagandist.
74. See: Keith Harmon Snow, “Special Report: Exposing U.S. Agents of Low Intensity Warfare in Africa: The ‘Policy Wonks’ behind Covert Warfare and Humanitarian Fascism,” Dissident Voice, 9 September 2012; and Remingius Kintu, The Truth Behind the Rwanda Tragedy, a paper presented as part of personal testimony at the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda, Arusha, Tanzania, date unknown.
75. Michela Wrong, Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad, PublicAffairs, 2021: p. 350.
76. Rebecca Washington, “Special Report: The Wonks who Sold Washington on South Sudan,” Reuters, 11 July 2012.
77. See, e.g.: Remingius Kintu, The Truth Behind the Rwanda Tragedy, a paper presented as part of personal testimony at the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda, Arusha, Tanzania, date unknown.
78. Helen Epstein, who claims a friendship with William Pike, wrote a brief, ambivalent book review of Combatants, wherein she challenges Pike’s accounting of the war, his whitewashing of NRA crimes and blaming everything on Obote and others, providing an important though subdued critique. Helen Epstein, “The Elephant Culture”, New York Review of Books, June 2019.
79. William Pike, Combatants: A Memoir of the Bush War and the Press in Uganda, self-published, 2019.
80. Catherine Watson, Exile from Rwanda: Background to an Invasion, Issue Paper, U.S. Committee for Refugees, 1991.
81. On the NRA and RPA commission of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide: [1] the military tactics of the NRA qualify on at least the first two counts; [2] from November 1989 to June 1990, Major Paul Kagame was head of the NRA’s Directorate of Military Intelligence; [3] the October 1990 invasion of Rwanda by Ugandan troops—read: ‘RPA rebels’—was a supreme violation of state sovereignty in contravention of international law; [4] the RPA invasion and occupation of northern Rwanda involved atrocities targeting the Hutu people precisely because they were Hutus.
82. See the abbreviated discussion of Inyenzi: Michela Wrong, Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad, PublicAffairs, 2021: p. 119.
83. Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda, Princeton University Press, 2001.
84. Michela Wrong recounts the transformation of the Rwandan Patriotic Front’s intellectual insider Dr. Theogene Rudasingwa from soldier of misfortune to Born Again Christian.
85. Private communication with the author, 17 October 2021.
86. Even Rwanda and Burundi (1972), the seminal work of Rene Lemarchand—another of the world’s premier Central Afrika experts—suffers from of an overly distorted hyperinflated Tutsis-as-Victims bias.
87. See, e.g.: Helen C. Epstein, Another Fine Mess: America, Uganda, and the War on Terror, Columbia Global Reports, 2017.
88. See, e.g.: Wayne Madsen, Genocide and Covert Relations in Africa, 1993-1999, Edwin Mellen Press, 1999, and the general Central Africa reportage by Keith Harmon Snow.
89. Michela Wrong, Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad, PublicAffairs, 2021: p. 29.
90. E.g.: Canadian journalist Judi Rever, and U.S. journalists Ann Garrison and Jennifer Fierberg.
91. Brigadier General Frank Rusagara, Rwanda Defense Forces (formerly RPA), quoted in Major Robert Beeland Rehder Jr., From Guerrillas to Peacekeepers: the Evolution of the Rwanda Defense Forces, Master of Military Studies, United States Marine Corps, Command and Staff College, April 15, 2008.
92. Michela Wrong, Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad, PublicAffairs, 2021: p. 290, para. 5.

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This is a fascinating and beautiful book, one of those gems you serendipitously discover and shake your head at your good fortune.  Although it is new and I received it as a gift, it reminds me of a few books I have discovered over the years while rummaging through used bookstores that have startled me into a new perspective on life.  Ironically, these books have advised me, whether explicitly or implicitly, to be done with books, because what I was seeking cannot be found in them, for it floats on the wind.  But this paradox is their secret.  Such discoveries are memorable, and this is a memorable book in so many ways.

Despite having read more books than I wish to remember, I had never heard of David Lorimer until being informed by a friend.  A Scottish writer, poet, editor, and lecturer of great accomplishments, he is the editor of The Paradigm Explorer and was the Director of the Scientific and Medical Network from 1986-2000 where he is now Program Director.  He has written or edited over a dozen books.

He is one of a dying breed: a true intellectual with a soul, for his writing covers the waterfront, by which I mean the vast ocean of philosophy, science, theology, literature, psychology, spirituality, politics, etc.  A Quest for Wisdom [isbn.nu] is precisely what its name implies.  It is a compendium of wide-ranging essays written over the past forty years in pursuit of the meaning of life and the sagacity to realize one never arrives at wisdom since it is a process, not a product.  Like living.

His opening essay on Victor Frankl, the Austrian psychiatrist who survived Auschwitz and wrote so pofoundly about it in Man’s Search for Meaning, [isbn.nu] sets the stage for all the essays that follow.  For Frankl’s life and work, and the stories he tells about it, are about experiential, not theoretical, discoveries in the world where one finds oneself – even Auschwitz – where he learned that Nietzsche’s words were true: “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” He discovered that along life’s path – between life and death, happiness and suffering, peaks and valleys, yesterday and tomorrow, etc. – is where we always find ourselves by responding to the questions life asks us. He tells us, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

We are always in-between, and it is our attitude and conduct that allows us to freely will the meaning of our lives, no matter what.  Frankl came to call this search for meaning logotherapy, or meaning therapy, by which an individual is always free to choose one’s stance or course of action, and it is by such choosing that the greatness of life can be measured and meaning confirmed in any single moment, even retrospectively.  He maintains that modern people are disorientated and living in “an existential vacuum,” pursuing happiness when it cannot be pursued since it is a derivative, a side effect, and “it is the very pursuit of happiness that thwarts happiness.”  Happiness falls out of our pockets when we aren’t looking. Additionally, as Lorimer writes about Frankl, “He rejects psychoanalytical determinism…and the actualization of the self through any form of gratification.”

So does Lorimer, for he is an in-between man (as we all are if only we realized it), whether he is writing about Frankl, the absurd and the mysterious, the Tao, science and spirituality, the brain and the mind, near death experiences (“near” being the key word), Albert Schweitzer, Dag Hammarskjöld, freedom and determinism, ethics and politics, etc.

Whatever subject he touches, he illuminates, leaving the reader to interrogate oneself.  I find such questions in every essay in this book, and the path to answer them snaking through its pages.

I was especially touched by his 2008 essay, which was originally a memorial lecture, about his friend the Irish writer and philosopher John Moriarty, who died in 2007.  Moriarty’s work was rooted in the wild land of western Ireland, a place whose rugged beauty has sprouted many a passionate artist and visionary who have drunk deep of the mythical spiritual connections of Irish culture and natural beauty.  He was a brilliant thinker and storyteller – that mysterious quality that seems so Irish – who left an academic career to seek deeper truths in nature.  Influenced by D. H. Lawrence, Wordsworth, Yeats, Boehme, Melville, and Nietzsche, among other visionary seeking artists, he discovered a Blakean sense of reality that counteracted the deification of Reason and emphasized the need to recover our souls through sympathetic knowing that involved an embrace of intuition that went beyond cognition.   Lorimer writes:

Or, as John would put it, we have fallen out of our story and need to find a new one. Not only a new story, but also a new way of seeing and being, of relating as a part to the whole, as individuals to society, as cells to the body…To be is to have the potential to become something else, a potential which we don’t always fulfill, in spite of life’s invitations and initiations…We too easily retreat into fear, we batten down the hatches in the name of security, which is a mere shadow of peace.

Lorimer is clearly not anti-science, since for thirty-five years he has been deeply involved with the Scientific and Medical Network.  But he has long realized the limitations of science and all the essays touch on this theme in one way or another.  Wisdom is his goal, not knowledge.  He mentions Iain McGilchrist’s work in this regard – The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World – wherein McGilchrist argues for a reemphasis on the master right hemisphere “with its creative and holistic mode of perception,” rather than the left hemisphere with its logical, scientific mode of perception.  “Two voyages,” says Lorimer, “two modes of perception, which should coexist in a state of mutual respect.  The rational and the intuitive are complementary rather than mutually exclusive.”  Nevertheless, in his pursuit of wisdom, Lorimer, despite his nod to this mutuality, has discovered that the recovery of soul and meaning can only be found beyond cognition and Kantian categories.

His essay on “Tao and the Path towards Integration,” drawing on Carl Jung and Herman Hesse, et al., is a lucid exploration of what Jung calls “the vocation to personality.”  This is the call life puts to everyone but many refuse to hear or answer: “Become who you are,” in Nietzsche’s enigmatic words, advice that is as much a question as a declaration.  Lorimer writes:

Those who have not been confronted with this question will often consider those who have as peculiar, adding that there is no such thing as a vocation to personality, and their sense of being isolated and different is a form of spiritual arrogance; they should concern themselves with the really important things in life, viz ‘getting on’, and leading an inconspicuously normal existence.

These restless-busyness people are caught on the treadmill of getting and spending, and in their alienation from their true selves must disdain those who seek wholeness by grasping life’s polarities and paradoxes.  Stillness in movement, being in becoming.  Paradox: from Latin para = contrary to, and doxa = opinion.  Contrary to common belief or expectation.

In “Cultivating a Sense of Beauty,” Lorimer uses his etymological understanding – which is so important for deep thinking and which he uses liberally throughout the book – to explain “the beauty of holiness, and the correspondence between beauty and truth.”  He is not some bliss-ninny who is in the interior soul decoration business devoid of political consciousness and care.  Far from it.  He understands the connection between real beauty in its deepest sense and its connection to love for all existence and the responsibility that this confers on everyone to resist war and all forms of political oppression.  What Camus tried to do: To serve beauty and suffering.  “The English word ‘beauty’, like the French ‘beauté, is derived from the Latin ‘beare’ meaning to bless or gladden, and the ‘beatus’, blessed are the happy.” Appropriately, Lorimer quotes Wordsworth from “Intimations of Immortality.”

Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, its fears,
To me the meanest flower that grows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

Whether he is writing about Albert Schweitzer, Swedenborg, Voltaire, Dag Hammarskjöld, Peter Deunov (a Bulgarian mystic I first learned about here), he weaves their thought and witness into his overarching theme of the search for wisdom.  Wisdom not in the navel-gazing sense but in the larger sense as wisdom for creating a world of truth, peace, and justice.

In the middle of the book’s three sections, called “Consciousness, Death, and Transformation,” he offers various intriguing pieces that explore near death experiences and the philosophical, experiential, and scientific arguments for their reality.  In this rejection of the materialist conception of mind, brain, and consciousness, he relies on thinkers such as William James and Henri Bergson, but especially the Swedish scientist, philosopher, theologian, and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) who had many psychic and spiritual experiences that have been both accepted as inspired and rejected as hokum. Lorimer reminds us that Swedenborg was not some nutcase but was a brilliant and accomplished thinker.  “It’s is not well known the Swedenborg wrote a 700-page book on the brain, in which he was the first to suggest complementary roles for the two hemispheres.” Likewise,  Lorimer’s work with The Scientific and Medical Network and the Galileo Commission over the decades roots his writing on this topic in the work of many prominent neuroscientists and is far from New Age gibberish.  It is serious work that demands serious attention.  He accurately writes:

The problem of death will not disappear if we ignore it. Sooner or later we must come to terms with our own nature and destiny.What is the nature of man, of death, and what are the nature of the implications of death for the way in which we live our lives?  The first two questions amount to asking about the nature of consciousness.

In the third and final section – “Taking Responsibility: Ethics and Society” – Lorimer, drawing often on Albert Schweitzer who has deeply influenced him, applies the natural consequences of the soulful wisdom he embraces in the first two sections.  In the face of endless wars, poverty, ecological degradation, and the threat of nuclear war, etc., he writes, “Those who have the interests of humanity at heart cannot simply stand back in helplessness and despair: they must act themselves and arouse those around them to similar action or else abdicate their humanity by not shouldering their responsibility.”  This can be accomplished through a commitment to truth, love, peaceableness, kindness, and non-violent action, first at the individual level but crucially then when a sufficient number of people can be organized for this effort.  “This in turn demands a spiritual commitment and an initial step of faith or confidence, which the person who wishes to devote him- and herself to humanity cannot not afford to make.”

His essay on Dag Hammarskjöld, the former Secretary General of the United Nations, who was a key ally of President John F. Kennedy in their work for peace and decolonialization and who, like JFK, was assassinated by CIA organized forces, is a perfect example of such faith and commitment in a true public servant.  Hammarskjöld was a deeply spiritual man, a mystical political man of action, and Lorimer, drawing on Hammarskjöld’s own writing, shows how he embodied all the qualities found in one who was truly wise: self-effacement, stillness in action, detachment, humility, forgiveness, and courage in the face of the unknown.  He quotes Hammarskjöld:

Now, when I have overcome my fears – of others, of myself, of the underlying darkness – at the frontier of the unheard-of: Here ends the known. But, from a source beyond it, something fills my being with its possibilities.

I am reminded of JFK’s love of Abraham Lincoln’s prayer, which Kennedy lived by in the dark times before his assassination, which he anticipated: “I know there is a God – and I see a storm coming.  If he has a place for me, I believe that I am ready.”

The last essay in this illuminating and inspiring book – “Towards a Culture of Love-an Ethic of Interconnectedness” – was written in 2007, and all of them go back many decades, but in case a reader of this review may wonder where Lorimer stands today, he has added an afterword with a postscript in which he writes briefly about today’s assault on heresy, dissidence, and those who have been falsely called “conspiracy theorists” in the CIA’s weaponized term.  I mention that to make clear that A Quest for Wisdom is not an encouragement to navel gazing and some sort of pseudo-spirituality.  It is a call to a spiritual awakening in today’s fight against radical evil.  He makes clear that the conspiracy theorist label is being unjustly used against those who question the JFK assassination, the 9/11 Commission Report, Covid-19, etc.  He says we are being subjected to a major information war and extensive censorship of non-mainstream views.”  He sums it up this way:

Over the past few months we have witnessed a new episode of Inquisition and the implicit creation of an online Index of Prohibited Material. There has been a steep rise in censorship by social media companies of views at variance with mainstream narratives: dissident content is summarily removed. Heretical and subversive views are not tolerated, open debate is stifled in favor of officially sanctioned orthodoxy, whistle-blowers are abused and demonized. Manipulated by fear and on a flimsy pretext of security, we are in danger of abjectly surrendering the very freedom of thought and expression that our ancestors fought so courageously to secure in the eighteenth century and which constitutes the essence of our Enlightenment legacy…

These are the words of a wise man and the author of a wonderful book.

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Yanis Varoufakis’ new book, Another Now, is a utopian novel. It follows the form of most utopian works in that it is didactic, with minimal character development and a slim plot line. So, if that turns you off, you might as well not read further. However, if you do enjoy informed speculations of a possible future world, then you might like Another Now.

I purposely say “informed” to distinguish this utopian fiction from total fantasy, though like almost all works in this genre there is an element of fantasy. Julian West, for example, in Edward Bellamy’s 19th century best-seller Looking Backward awakes after 133 years from a hypnotic sleep. William Morris’ protagonist in News from Nowhere, Willian Guest, more reasonably awakes from a sleep induced by a political meeting to find himself pleasurably roaming about in a utopia devoid of the regimentation of Bellamy’s future. Varoufakis’ traveler, a software engineer named simply Costa, while fiddling with electronics in his lab, contacts a utopian resident via an accidentally induced time warp.

The fantastic nature of the encounter gives way to a realism only a radical professor of economics could provide. In fact, Another Now, could be considered an entertaining economics lesson—a lesson in democratic economics.

Varoufakis taught economics around the world including the University of Texas, at Austin. In 2015, given his reputation, he was appointed the Greek Finance Minister in the left-wing government and tried to negotiate with EU bankers a favorable financial settlement of Greek debt. He failed and Greece was plunged into something approaching bankruptcy. That experience propelled him into an activist role as the founder of DiEM25 a platform for radical politics in Europe.

Another Now rolls out the story of a path not taken by Occupy movements in 2011, but one where a few subversive groups working in various sectors of society—electronics, banking, politics—manage to leverage their expertise to force the capitulation of powerful institutions to their demands. Varoufakis delves deeply into a detailed depiction of the alternative economic mechanisms that lead to a more democratic society in this other future. For those who are either involved with cooperatives, especially worker cooperatives (a growing sector with a thousand in the pipeline), or who are agitating for democratic economic structures Another Now will be engrossing.

Over five years ago, Varoufakis was the economist-in-residence for Valve, the gaming company, advising them on their flat organizational structure. (Some currently contest Valve’s adherence to those non-hierarchical values.) He brings that experience of self-management to this book. Another Now, however, expands both the contemporary cooperative sector’s tepid criticism of capitalism and its precarious position in the market economy. In the utopia outlined here, there is universal participation in the management of all enterprises. Beyond that, every person receives a substantial stipend based on the economic bounty society provides (a minority no longer absconds with the common wealth). Subsequently, banks have been made redundant since all transactions are recorded as personal data without the need of bankers—so no savings and checking accounts. And further, since individuals have funds at their disposal they can collectively invest directly in a project without the mediation of bankers’ loans and stock brokers’ fees.

The history of the emergence of these radical reforms and how they function form that economics lesson I mentioned. It unfolds as a story of Costa and his two friends trying to survive in our fucked-up society. His friends draw on their embittered experiences in politics and economics to express their misgivings of Costa’s communications from “another now.” Their skepticism of a future society free of much of the political and economic constraints we suffer elucidates the radicalism of the measures enacted. The critical, dialogic conversation between the three friends is a standard teaching technique, and it works here to clarify how our economy could be replaced, at least partially, with one that better serves us.

How this future society evolved, nonetheless, left me disappointed that the agents for change were small groups of skilled people who managed to leverage their exclusive (privileged?) knowledge to contest and defeat established institutions. For example, there were the Crowdshorters who organized boycotts of utility payments, which forced private investment out of that field. Then there were the Solsourcers who agitated for the mass withholding of pension contributions to funds holding super-exploitive corporate stock. The Bladerunners, organized mass consumer strikes targeting big tech companies and the Wikiblowers, infected government computers worldwide with a virus that exposed all their secret files preventing retaliation from security forces against the rebels.

These were lovely actions, with mass support, that are precisely recounted by Varoufakis, along with their devastating repercussions against authority. However, it is dismaying that, while ostensibly these groups developed in the wake of the experiences of Occupy throughout the world, they are not that reflective of the spirit of Occupy. An exemplary occurrence of that spirit was the spontaneous volunteer support that rushed to aid those devastated by Hurricane Sandy.

And what resonates more with the creative subversions Costa describes, though not its form, was the Reddit inspired mass short-selling that bankrupted a major hedge fund and threw the stock market into a panic. This action was sparked by a suggestion on Reddit there was no cabal of players directing it—it was a mass rebellion against the millionaires on Wall Street.

Small groups of dedicated revolutionaries who have taken the stage of history to propel populations to rebel have often betrayed that spirit of revolt by institutionalizing their role. To prevent the recurrence of authoritarianism, a popular movement, embedded in the culture of a society, must be actively experimenting with democratic forms. Popular rebellions may erupt spontaneously, but their germination occurs over time, whereas coups occur overnight.

Costa refers to the Spanish anarchists in passing near the beginning of the book. The laudable role of the anarchists served as an inoculation against hierarchical politics of the left and the right, from liberals to Leninists. Varoufakis obviously knows this history and so it is unfortunate that they, and their significance in forming a revolutionary culture, are absent in his tale. His decision may have been a novelistic expedient—the story moves faster with these swift and dramatic social changes. And too, he’s an economist, not an anthropologist who would be cognizant of daily life, like Ursula Le Guin.

The demise of Occupy across the US was expedited by Obama’s coordinated nationwide crackdown using local police, so the movement never had a chance to evolve. And this is the story of many popular revolts. They get crushed, and power attempts to erase memories—a hundred years ago by fiddling with photos, burning books, and, most effectively, killing participants. Today we have corporate media performing that task. Power, however, never totally succeeds. The slow development of a culture of rebellion is built on those defeats.

Varoufakis decision to dismiss the development of a culture of rebellion in his utopia, is equalled by his neglect of the dire social implications of climate chaos. Yes, the worst corporate befoulers of the environment are financially attacked in his novel, but that’s only one aspect of the chaos entrained by their extractive practices. What about land and forest reclamation? Feeding and housing the millions of starving climate immigrants? Who will pay to correct the acidification of the oceans or, for that matter, where will potable water come from as aquifers increasingly run dry?

The marketplace propels the engine of growth.  It is certainly not the place to fund reclamation. And if the state needs to rectify corporate despoilation, what sort of common wealth will be left to distribute to the citizenry?

These issues are far beyond the scope of Another Now; however, there is a saving value to the vision of economic democracy outlined by Varoufakis. He describes an insightful speculation of what would constitute an economic platform to deal with the issues of climate chaos. His utopia creatively contributes, in a far better way than a dry academic analysis, to a possible route out of the economic quagmire impeding rebellion. And in this way, Another Now follows the history of utopian novels: they arouse critical thought which can spawn oppositional movements. For example, Edward Bellamy’s Nationalist Clubs, there were 162 of them in 1891, formed as discussion groups after he published Looking Backward, and they were significant in leading to the progressive movement at the turn of the century. Maybe dreaming is not a waste of time.

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This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

The elevation of Donald Trump onto the national political stage in 2016 provoked a heated debate among centrist and left-wing commentators that has yet to be resolved (and likely never will be): do Trump and the Republican Party today represent a recrudescence of fascism, or is this a flawed historical analogy? Writers like Timothy Snyder and Jason Stanley insisted on the parallels between interwar fascism and the contemporary far-right, from demonization of ethnic “Others” to fomenting of violence against democratic institutions (as on January 6, 2021); writers such as Samuel Moyn and Corey Robin disagreed, arguing that Trump proved to be much too weak a figure—and his attacks on the political order were much too weak—to legitimately be called fascist. Scores of articles and books have been published litigating the term “fascism” and its applicability to various ugly phenomena across the American political scene. ¹

Wisely, journalist Shane Burley bypasses this debate in his new collection of essays Why We Fight: Essays on Fascism, Resistance, and Surviving the Apocalypse. It’s clear there are both similarities and differences between classical fascism, on the one hand, and Trumpism and the modern far-right on the other. (For this reason, one might call the latter neofascism or proto-fascism, as an acknowledgement of the valid points made on both sides of the debate.) Instead, Burley takes it for granted, and illustrates throughout his book, that a vast constellation of groups and individuals on the right today have salient fascist characteristics and would happily tear down democracy if they could. Why We Fight consists mostly of articles Burley has published in recent years shedding light on these shadowy groups, this underworld of the Alt-Right and its relatives.

In seventeen chapters, Burley illuminates the methods and varieties of both fascist and anti-fascist organizing. Among the topics he covers are the rise and fall of the Alt-Right, from 2008 to the aftermath of the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally in 2017; the nature of the “Alt-Light,” a less extreme version of the far-right that coalesced around figures like Milo Yiannopoulos, Alex Jones, and online “manosphere” leader Mike Cernovich; the toxic cult of masculinity that unites a wide range of far-right groups; the world of fascist publishing in Europe and the U.S., led by companies like Arktos Media and Counter-Currents that are dedicated to “creating the intellectual foundation for a new fascism” (p. 151); attempts by anti-fascists to colonize cultural spaces that have often attracted fascists, such as soccer, gun clubs, mixed martial arts, the paganism and heathenry subculture, and, in music, black metal and neofolk; the deep-rooted and continuing appeal of antisemitism to the far-right; and even the remarkable Kurdish experiment in an anarchist, anti-fascist society at Rojava. Altogether, the book gives a nuanced and compelling picture of the highly fragmented, internally divided, typically amateurish, but very frightening world of the contemporary far-right—from the Proud Boys to militia organizations, from journalist provocateurs like Andy Ngô to the neo-Confederate Council of Conservative Citizens (founded in 1985), from “lone wolf” mass shooters to student groups like Turning Point USA that seek to intimidate and silence left-wing voices at college campuses.

As an “advocacy journalist,” Burley eschews a neutral or academic tone; he combines history, journalism, psychology, an editorial voice, and even memoir to stitch together a tapestry that, in its totality, serves to communicate the urgency of fighting and defeating all these noxious forces. In one of his pieces, for example, he argues that anti-fascist activists (often known collectively as antifa), rather than some diffuse “public opinion” or mainstream intellectual commentary, were responsible for the downfall of the Alt-Right in the months after Charlottesville. Through constant interference with public talks by Alt-Right speakers, pressure on university administrations and other venues not to permit such talks, counter-protests, violent physical confrontations, and other aggressive measures, left-wing activists essentially shut down the Alt-Right phase of the white nationalist movement.

“Police barricades,” Burley writes, “last-minute venue cancelations, and public brawls overshadowed the Alt Right’s message, and as members were doxxed and fired from their jobs, it became harder and harder to make their movement attractive to recruits. In the wake of Charlottesville, they were forced off social media, web hosting, podcast platforms, and just about every outreach tool available, leaving them only to the back alleys of the internet” (p. 57). He clearly endorses such tactics, barely even acknowledging concerns about censorship and the right to free speech.

It would have been interesting, however, for him to delve into the ongoing debate over tactics and moral principles. Or, if this would have distracted from the book’s journalistic focus, it is at least incumbent on the reader to think through these issues. On one side are, it appears, the majority of leftists who both deny that fascists have a right to be heard and, tactically, think the best way to defeat them is to prevent them from being heard. On the other side are principled civil libertarians such as Noam Chomsky and Glenn Greenwald who argue that everyone has the right to be heard, neither the state nor private entities like Twitter and Facebook should be allowed to police speech (for then what is to prevent them from policing left-wing speech, as they, in fact, constantly do?), and even tactically the best way to defeat fascists is to let them air their views so that others can expose their absurdity and immorality. Chomsky, for instance, argues that while fascists should never be invited to speak at college campuses, if they are, the best response is not to shut down the event—which allows the speaker to pose as a great defender of free speech under attack by leftist totalitarians—but to use it as an educational opportunity and organize a counter-event exposing the hideousness of far-right ideas. ²

One might reply, on the other hand, that making life miserable for fascists does seem to help inhibit the growth of a movement. (But, again, is such harassment, including violence, wrong in principle?) As for “deplatforming” the far-right, someone in Burley’s camp might concede that social media companies (for example) should not have the right to police speech and indeed should be publicly owned and operated, while maintaining at the same time that as long as private entities do have this right and are happy to wield it against the left, activists should pressure them to wield it also against racists. If doing so helps conservatives and centrists vilify leftists as authoritarian and opposed to free speech, so be it.

A chapter devoted to these questions of principle and tactics, thorough and fair-minded in its treatment of the conflicting arguments, might have been a valuable addition to Burley’s book, especially given the book’s activist purpose.

One theme that recurs in some of the essays is the useful reminder that fascism doesn’t always wear its heart on its sleeve, and it is important to be able to see through euphemisms or non-fascist appearances to the political reality and poisonous potential underneath. Burley quotes reporter Tess Owen: “Far-right publishing companies like Arktos have sought to give white nationalism a veneer of pseudo-intellectual legitimacy by dressing up old, ugly, racist ideas in euphemisms. For example, their authors don’t talk about whiteness, they talk about ‘European identity.’ This is part of a calculated strategy: move out of the fringes, and into the political mainstream” (p. 164). There are certainly “degrees” of fascism among groups and individuals on the right, but, in the words of Burley, to the extent that there is commitment to “human inequality, social traditionalism, racial nationalism, and an authoritarian vision founded in the resurrection of heroic mythologies” (p. 65), there is an affinity for fascism.³

Even the mere cult of masculinity, widespread among large numbers of disaffected men in an age of social dissolution, can embody very dangerous ideological impulses, as Burley documents in his lengthy final chapter. The whole online “manosphere” of “men’s rights” advocates, incels, pick-up artists, and the like, can be considered a sort of gateway drug to fascism—and it must be said that leftists ignore or ridicule these millions of lost male souls at their peril. When you leave the indoctrinating and organizing of men, as men, to the right-wing, what you get are weird perversions like the neopagan Wolves of Vinland, which Burley has investigated in depth. Founded in 2005 by the bodybuilder Paul Waggener, the Wolves of Vinland is a “male-tribalist organization” that assures men that “the promise of their patriarchal authority is built into the connective tissue of the natural world and that their feeling of anxiety is the proper reaction to the ‘attack on men’ that the modern world has devised” (p. 261). Until being recently discontinued, its online and in-person program Operation Werewolf—“equal parts pagan instruction, workout regimen, and self-help manual” (p. 261)—attracted men from all over the world who craved the “Total Life Reform” it promised. This involved, in part, being indoctrinated into a semi-Nietzschean ideology that glorified violence, physical strength and pain, an idealized masculinity, tribalism, hierarchy, and contempt for the effeminate weakness and decadence of modern society.

What is most frightening about Operation Werewolf, which Burley discusses in great detail while interweaving stories of his own personal experiences with unhealthily masculinist cultures, is that it is just one tiny node in a sprawling global network of similar proto-fascist subcultures. What the left’s answer to this challenge should be is not entirely clear. Burley’s proposed solutions to fascist organizing, scattered throughout the book, are, perhaps inevitably, vague; for instance, to counter groups like the Wolves of Vinland, he suggests we “build up communities that are strong,” “rediscover spiritual traditions…that can connect us to where we are today,” and “help people build a body cult to stay tied to their physicality and health, not to fit the prescriptions of a hierarchical and fat-phobic fitness culture, but to build themselves according to the vision they alone have” (p. 305). What is clear is that the task of defeating cultures of “toxic masculinity,” which often overlap with white supremacy, will require meeting people on their own terms and dispensing with contemporary leftists’ beloved “purity tests” for who they will or won’t interact with.

Why We Fight is, in short, worth a read if one seeks information about cultures of the far-right. This isn’t to say, however, that it is immune to criticism. Burley’s style of writing, while at times eloquent, is often awkward, as well as needlessly prolix, rambling, and repetitive. The frequent typos and grammatically awkward constructions are distracting. More substantively, it would have been nice to see some information on the kinds of people who have been attracted to these fascist organizations, such as their class, occupational, and geographic backgrounds. Statistical studies of Trump’s supporters have shown them to be disproportionately petty-bourgeois and moderately affluent, though frequently without a college degree: small business owners, real estate brokers, managers, and so on—not primarily “the white working class,” despite the mythology.⁴ The same is presumably true of the groups Burley discusses, but he presents very little data on the matter.

Likewise, one would have appreciated more information on the funding sources of all these far-right groups, particularly to what extent some of them might be supported by reactionary big business. Doubtless such information is not readily available, though.

In the end, however imperative it is to fight against such organizations as the Wolves of Vinland, or the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, the American Identity Movement, the Atomwaffen Division, etc., it is surely not these peons, the flotsam and jetsam of a tempestuous capitalist society, who present the gravest danger to the country and the world. It is the “respectable” people and institutions: the Charles Kochs of the world, the ExxonMobils, the Citigroups and JPMorgan Chases, the Defense Departments and Supreme Courts—the ruling class. These are the agents of our coming immolation in the fires of ecological holocaust and, possibly, nuclear war. Relatively speaking, the likes of Paul Waggener and Andy Ngô are picayune. They’re dangerous, but more dangerous are the well-funded think tanks and propaganda outlets like the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute—two of the forces behind the immensely damaging Tea Party—or the Manhattan Institute, one of whose “senior fellows” (Christopher Rufo) is almost entirely responsible for the current furor over “critical race theory.”⁵ Fox News, One America News, the Daily Caller, the Daily Wire—these are the entities that indoctrinate tens of millions.

How, or whether, the left can dethrone these truly demonic forces before they cause the demise of society is the burning question. As always, the answer can only be found through mass education and organization.

1. For an overview of the debate, see Udi Greenberg, “What Was the Fascism Debate?,” Dissent (Summer, 2021). Links to some sources can be found at Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell, “Know your Enemy:  Did It Happen Here?,” Dissent, January 19, 2021.
2. The journalist Natasha Lennard, who wrote a foreword to Why We Fight, contests Chomsky’s position by making the remarkable claim that arguing against white supremacy is futile; only force (of various kinds) can work. “Anyone who has watched [Richard] Spencer and his ilk in public debates,” she writes, “…should see how the belief that his violent white supremacy can be reasoned away is flawed. He sticks to his guns about the necessity of a white ‘ethno-state’…” But the point, of course, is not to convince the fanatical racists themselves; the point is to educate and inoculate the public, including young men who might otherwise be susceptible to white supremacy. It is deeply defeatist and cynical to have no faith in the power of rational argument. See Natasha Lennard, “Is Antifa Counterproductive? White Nationalist Richard Spencer Would Beg to Differ,” The Intercept, March 17, 2018.
3. On this understanding, the intellectual celebrity Jordan Peterson, for example, who is enamored of hierarchies (“consider the lobster!”), archaic myths, cultural tradition, strong and heroic masculinity, and the conflict between Order and Chaos, has quite a few points of contact with fascism. See Pankaj Mishra, “Jordan Peterson and Fascist Mysticism,” New York Review of Books, March 19, 2018.
4. Jesse A. Myerson, “Trumpism: It’s Coming from the Suburbs,” Nation, May 8, 2017.
5. Benjamin Wallace-Wells, “How a Conservative Activist Invented the Conflict over Critical Race Theory,” New Yorker, June 18, 2021. On the origins of the Tea Party, see Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (New York: Anchor Books, 2017)—or, more briefly, my blog post “The rise of right-wing libertarianism since the 1950s.”

The post Resisting Fascism first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.