Yesterday everyone was hating on poor little Belgium. It was over that ballgame in Brazil. I'm not in the Ann Coulter camp or anything, but I just don't get any more excited about soccer than I do about baseball or football or bad mitten. And Belgium… well, I have to admit, was always fly-over country for me when I lived in Amsterdam and visited Paris as frequently as possible-- except I drove. When I did visit Belgium in more recent years, I came to appreciate that the food was pretty amazing-- my faves in Brussels being Comme Chez Soi, L'Épicerie, and Les Brasseries Georges-- but I could never get over Adam Hochschild's 1998 historical masterpiece, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, And Heroism In Colonial Africa. A few years ago I did a post about how the CIA conspired with Belgium to murder the first elected-- and last I think-- president of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, based in great part on Hochschild's work.Monday Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as Colin Powell's chief of staff when he was Secretary of State, wrote about how the national myths of the "civilized countries" like the U.S. and Belgium "mask or even convert most of the crimes, and what the myths don't eliminate or alter poor education and memory lapses do." He was referring too the murder, plunder, slaughter, devastation, torture and massacre the civilized nations, primarily of the Northern Hemisphere, perpetrated against the backward nations of the Southern Hemisphere. And the latest myths about Justice and human rights progress is belied by, for example, the hideous unprosecuted war criminal Dick Cheney. "As has been the case since humankind began to organize itself," wrote Wilkerson, "Dick Cheney believes that wealth and power-- his and his cronies wealth and power foremost-- are still the relevant strategic objectives of empire. King Leopold of Belgium is not dead, simply reincarnated in a more modern form. Torturing people is dependent on a nation's supposed needs, killing people on the expediency of policy, waging war on monetary and commercial gain, and lying to the people is a highly reputable tactic in pursuit of each. Leopold would love Dick Cheney."
Cheney even models Leopold: never in the dangerous fray himself (five draft deferments, e.g.), a master of bureaucratic manipulation and intrigue, in love to a fault with secrecy, willing to undertake any crime under the sun so long as it leads to profit, deeply relishing every moment of evil he is able to engineer, and a master of masking it all through adroit, politically-attuned public relations aimed at people too stupid to question him -- all while paying absolutely no attention to what his past clearly demonstrates he has done, thus thoroughly frustrating the decent folks all around him. Leopold to a "T."This modern man, Cheney, however needs no kingship, no ornate palaces, no personally-owned colony like the Congo; Cheney's writ is the world. It is all of humankind that Cheney would torture, enslave, murder, or plunder if it were required. And Cheney is the ultimate arbiter of whether it is required. Take a look at that face as he tells the American people and the world in 2002 that "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us."Now, wait a dozen years and envision the same face, somewhat leaner and-- if possible-- meaner, saying on the editorial pages of his Journal as Iraq implodes: "Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many." He is of course talking about President Obama, not President George W. Bush. Leopold, whom the American poet Vachel Lindsay, has "Burning in Hell...", must be yearning for Dick's arrival because no one, except perhaps for Leopold himself, would register such a claim in the face of such self-demeaning evidence to the contrary.In the same chapter of his book referenced above, Hochschild writes: "The Congo offers a striking example of the politics of forgetting." He is right. But it is more than forgetting. It is an abject lack of political courage to hold people accountable.In King Leopold's case, Belgium and the wider world want to move on and not look back. Holding people accountable would mean holding themselves accountable. That central Africa is today still an unfolding tragedy of exploitation, commercial rivalries, and indigenous incapacity partly an inheritance of colonialism, matters little. The world moves on relentlessly to fulfill its oligarchies' desires for wealth and power. Suitable rhetoric is developed and delivered to keep the masses quiescent. The Leopolds and Cheneys of the world are privately lauded for their hard-headed realpolitik while appropriately tut-tutted in public. Presidents and prime ministers proclaim that it would be nationally disruptive to hold people accountable for their crimes and, besides, they are more concerned for the future than the past.Which is why most people in America today live in the moment and in the moment alone. If they realized and cared about the past, if they used that realization and care to make the future better, they would not be able to live in the moment so well. In that respect, Leopold and Cheney are right: wealth and power is all that matters.