by Glen Ford, published on Black Agenda Report, November 19, 2020
Friends, I want to say that Glen’s incessant criticism of what he calls the ‘Black Misleadership Class’ is not (in my opinion) misplaced, but those of us who are not Black need to see it in perspective. Glen’s issues with the Black Misleadership Class are are not isolated to the BMC, but rather, show the BMC reflecting the the views of the white liberal patriarchy AND most liberals. All underclasses have a misleadership class in the halls of power. That is out ‘proof’ of US supremacy and our own empowerment. They are the phantasm to make us believe that we (and our issues) are represented in the halls of power when we (and they) clearly are not.
I could write a similar article about Susan Rice being supported by the Feminist face of Patriarchy. I could write an even easier one viewing Kamala Harris in this light since she is a big favorite of white middle class women and very much in the limelight. Functioning as an avatar for the patriarchy is hardly a high calling. And Susan Rice has been in power long enough to be more than a passive avatar, but rather a banshee possessed by the demos of unbridled ambition, arrogance and stubborn attachment to self-interest, like so many other neocon wrecking balls of the ilk of John Bolton or Dick Cheney or and even HIllary Clinton., another woman long supported BECAUSE she was a woman with power. A woman of power who doesn’t support the interests of women and children is not a feminist and the members of what Glen calls the Black Misleadership Class are not ‘Black’ leaders.
Moving on, this is a great review of the accompaniments of Susan Rice – so far. [jb]
Genocide in Congo and militarization of the African continent are Susan Rice’s specialties, but Black Democrats see her as a “role model.”
“Rice cultivated relations with every pro-U.S. warlord in Africa.”
No one in high levels of U.S. government has been more intimately complicit in the death of more than six million Africans in the Democratic Republic of Congo than Susan Rice, the bloodstained Democratic Party political operative who is actively seeking the job of secretary of state in the incoming Biden administration. If recent history is a guide, we can expect the entirety of the Black Democratic establishment to support this uber-criminal’s elevation as a fitting reward to Black voters for putting Joe Biden in the White House – thus implicating all of Black America in the largest genocide since World War Two.
Rice is a protégé of former secretary of state Madelaine Albright, who in 1996 infamously described the sanctions-induced death of half a million Iraqi children as “worth it ” to punish the Saddam Hussein regime. But Rice has bested her mass murderous mentor in total career body count. As President Bill Clinton’s national security advisor (1993 to 1997), senior director for African Affairs (1995 to 1997) and Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs (1997 to 2001), Rice was the point person in Washington’s massive coverup of the invasion, pillage and depopulation of Congo by the armies of U.S. client states Rwanda and Uganda. In service to the Obama administration (ambassador to the United Nations, 2009-2013, national security advisor, 2013-2017), Rice smothered a United Nations Mapping Report that documented Rwandan and Ugandan crimes against Congo, including potentially genocidal offenses, and protected Uganda from the International Court of Justice’s award of $10 billion in damages to the Democratic Republic Congo.
“Rice was the point person in Washington’s massive coverup of the invasion, pillage and depopulation of Congo.”
When the United Nation’s highest court issued its verdict in 2005, the death toll in Congo was estimated at 3 million. By 2010, with Ambassador Susan Rice at the United Nations, the uninterrupted genocide had claimed six million lives, while the looting of Congo’s vast mineral resources financed the rise of a gleaming skyline over Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, a nation that has no significant mineral deposits. Multinational corporations are the biggest beneficiaries of the ”blood” minerals; it is these conglomerates whose interests Susan Rice protects.
Today, Congolese speak of eight million dead, but nobody in the Congressional Black Caucus is listening. Half of the Black Caucus voted against a measure that would have halted President Obama’s bombing of Libya , in the summer of 2011. Obama claimed that the Euro-American air war in support of mainly jihadist opponents of Muammar Gaddafi’s secular government was not subject to the War Powers Act, because no Americans had died – a totally novel definition of war in which only American bodies matter. Rice was then ambassador to the United Nations, where she successfully pressed for a “no fly zone” as a cover for NATO’s war against Libya. “This resolution should send a strong message to Colonel Qadhafi and his regime that the violence must stop, the killing must stop and the people of Libya must be protected and have the opportunity to express themselves freely,” Rice told reporters . But the bulk of violence was committed by U.S.-backed “rebels” against Black Libyans and south Saharans working in the country. Tawergha , a Black Libyan town of almost 50,000 people, was utterly destroyed, its inhabitants killed, imprisoned or scattered – with not a peep of complaint from the Black American woman at the UN or the First Black President of the United States. The branded faces of Black migrant workers sold into slave markets are Rice and Obama’s Libyan legacy.
“Rice successfully pressed for a ‘no fly zone’ as a cover for NATO’s war against Libya.”
The unprovoked war against Libya, which removed a bulwark of African independent economic and political development, was heralded as AFRICOM’s “first major combat operation on the African continent.” There would be many more, as a Black U.S. administration methodically occupied the continent, from the Atlantic to the Indian oceans.
Rice cultivated relations with every pro-U.S. warlord in Africa. She was especially close to Meles Zenawi, the deceased former leader of the dictatorial Ethiopian regime that invaded Somalia with the full support of U.S. air, ground and sea power in December of 2006, ousting a moderate Islamic Courts government that had brought a brief period of peace to the country. The Somali war, now effectively run by the CIA, has engulfed the Horn of Africa – another bloody feather in Susan Rice’s cap.
When Rice was a candidate for secretary of state under President Obama in 2012, the entirety of the Black Misleadership Class circled their wagons around her, to counter Republican claims that Rice was to blame for the killing of the U.S. ambassador to Libya by U.S.-backed jihadists. Ignoring Rice’s and Obama’s crimes against Africans, Black American politicos rallied to Rice’s defense as a “a role model to all women” who “represents a rich and important legacy of strong women leaders in foreign policy.” Twelve female members of the Congressional Black Caucus, including anti-war icon Barbara Lee, offered Rice their sisterly support. “We will not allow a brilliant public servant’s record to be mugged to cut off her consideration to be secretary of state,” said DC congressional delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton.
“The Black Misleadership Class circled their wagons around her.”
None of Rice’s Black boosters gave a thought to her culpability in the ongoing terror in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where a 2011 study estimated that “nearly two million women have been raped…with women victimized at a rate of nearly one every minute.” (See Black Agenda Report, “The Shameless Vacuity of Susan Rice’s Boosters,” Dec 5, 2012.)
Rice’s bid for the top State Department job was frustrated in 2012, but she’s once again shamelessly campaigning for the office, reportedly with the backing of Obama . The Black Misleadership Class – eternally full of themselves – puts forth the worst possible image of Black America to the rest of the world, with not a iota of embarrassment. Having “arrived” at positions of influence in the belly of the beast, they strut about like any other variety of “ugly Americans” who want nothing more than to be full citizens of empire – humanity, including Africa, be damned.
In 1977 Glen Ford co-launched, produced and hosted “America’s Black Forum” (ABF), the first nationally syndicated Black news interview program on commercial television. Ford co-founded BlackCommentator.com (BC) in 2002. The weekly journal quickly became the most influential Black political site on the Net. In October, 2006, Ford and the entire writing team left BC to launch BlackAgendaReport.com (BAR). BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford(at)BlackAgendaReport.com