by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
Africa doesn’t matter, U.S. wars don’t matter, nothing matters to the Black Misleadership Class except the sickly prestige of basking in the (distant) glow of power. Susan Rice’s “Black boosters embrace an abettor of genocide and endless military interventions as one of their own – and indict themselves.”
The Shameless Vacuity of Susan Rice's Black Boosters
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
“They have rallied to the defense of a woman who has been mugging an entire continent since her appointment to Bill Clinton national security staff in 1993.”
In their reflexive circling of the wagons around United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice, the U.S. Black Misleadership Class reveal a total absence of political or moral values beyond the narrow pursuit of group prestige through proximity to imperial power. Even the dashiki-wearers among them care not a whit for Africa, whose rape and depopulation has been the focus of Rice’s incredibly destructive career. Rice’s intimate involvement in the murder of six million Congolese, her frenzied campaign to bomb and blockade Sudan, her successful instigation of regime change and race war in Libya, and her bloody-handed role in the ongoing torture of Somalia – all this means nothing to the vacuous and fawning class that claims to represent Black America.
Believing their own prestige to be entwined with Rice’s fortunes, her Black boosters embrace an abettor of genocide and endless military interventions as one of their own – and indict themselves.
“By any reasonable interpretation,” writes Dr. Avis A. Jones-DeWeever, Executive Director of the National Council of Negro Women, Rice has had “a stellar public service career.” Dr. Jones-DeWeever apparently finds it admirable that Rice has for a decade and a half zealously shielded Rwanda and Uganda, the two main culprits in the Congolese genocide, from censure or sanction at the United Nations and in the court of world opinion. “Bold sisters,” Jones-DeWeever admonishes, urging Black women to sign a petition in support of Rice, “Let this be the day we all say, Not again…Never again…Not on our watch!” Yet, on their “watch” Rice’s clients in the Rwandan and Ugandan armed forces and proxy “rebel” outfits have sown the chaos that has led to the rape of an estimated two million Congolese women.
“The broad outlines of racial atrocities by America’s allies and clients in Libya are no longer in dispute.”
Rice is widely credited with convincing President Obama to launch NATO’s eight-month bombing campaign against Libya, in 2011, resulting in a racist pogrom that killed or displaced many tens of thousands of black Libyans and migrant workers – a race war that continues to this very day. For Dr. Jones DeWeever, Rice’s role in this monstrous crime becomes, in language profane in its blandness, “someone who was instrumental in designing the resolution to the protracted Libyan clashes during that nation’s tumultuous period within the Arab Spring.” A Black bourgeois flavor to the banality of evil.
Although the broad outlines of racial atrocities by America’s allies and clients in Libya are no longer in dispute, Rice has remained silent on the issue. DeWeever keeps mum, too, although as an “accomplished scholar, writer, and public speaker“ – and as a person who feels qualified to assess Rice’s “stellar public service career” – one would assume she is at least somewhat familiar with the plight of black Libyans on Rice’s “watch.” We must conclude that she simply doesn’t care; that she deems the systematic murder and depopulation of blacks in Libya as immaterial compared to the need to populate U.S. high places with illustrious Black American faces.
In the same self-centered and fawning vein, incoming Congressional Black Caucus chairperson Rep. Marcia Fudge, of Cleveland, described Rice as “a person who has served this country with distinction,” while offering no assessment of the substance of that service. Surely, Jefferson Davis served the Confederate cause with “distinction,” too. “We will not allow a brilliant public servant’s record to be mugged to cut off her consideration to be secretary of state,” chimed in DC Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, one of the 12 Black female representatives who rallied to the defense of a woman who has been mugging an entire continent since her appointment to Bill Clinton's national security staff in 1993.
“The Institute of the Black World would do better to demand that Rice and the rest of the Obama administration keep their bloody hands off Africa.”
“We say hands off Ambassador Susan Rice!” Dr. Ron Daniels’ Institute of the Black World, a proudly Afro-centric organization, would do better to demand that Rice and the rest of the Obama administration keep their bloody hands off Africa. Republicans are “hypocrites “ who “have no moral or political authority to stand in judgment of Ambassador Susan Rice!” One can make that argument, but the Institute of the Black World and the rest of us certainly have the right and obligation to stand in judgment of a political operative and ideologue who, according to an article by Michael Hirsch in the Ethiopian Review, cavalierly dismissed the Rwanda/Uganda-sponsored M23 rebel group’s murderous rampages in the Democratic Republic of Congo. “It’s the eastern DRC. If it’s not M23, it’s going to be some other group.” Rice delayed for months publication of a United Nations panel of experts report documenting M23 as a front group for Congo’s neighbors, who have all but annexed the mineral-rich eastern part of the country since invading in 1996, leaving 6 million dead in their wake, half of them below the age of five. Rice and her then boss, Bill Clinton, supplied the money, arms and political cover. As Under Secretary of State for African Affairs, Rice left it up to Washington’s Rwandan and Ugandan puppets to safeguard against genocide. “They know how to deal with that,” Rice is quoted as saying. “The only thing we have to do is look the other way.”
Rice’s African American boosters also choose to look the other way. They shame us all.
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at [email protected].
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