From the FBI’s counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO) which murdered revolutionary geniuses like Fred Hampton and systematically dismantled the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement (among others) to the CIA’s overthrow of democratically elected leaders in Chile, Guatemala, and the Congo (among many, many, o), the United States government has blood on its hands like no other nation.
That this knowledge is readily available, unchallenged, and remains unofficial U.S. policy (see Gaza, happening as we speak) makes these brutal affairs even more unconscionable. Why do we, as American citizens with free access to all of the world’s history, continuously look the other way? Why do we continue to ignore so many atrocities committed in our name? What the hell is wrong with us?
What’s wrong with us is that we’ve been lied to our entire lives. The U.S. propaganda machine operates tirelessly to paint anyone who dares challenge American hegemony a kook or a dangerous madman. When, in the 1960s, Russia’s Nikita Khrushchev and Cuba’s Fidel Castro stood up in front of the UN Council denouncing U.S. imperialism and endless capitalist warfare on the poor and indigenous of the world, the nightly news labeled them treacherous dictators intent on destroying our way of life.
But that’s not what they were and that’s not what they wanted to do. We’ve been misled, and it’s high time we realized it. I know it’s a hard pill to swallow – that everything you’ve ever been told about world politics has been a complete fabrication – but if we can’t admit to ourselves the extent to which we’ve been propagandized, the capitalists will continue to bleed us and our planet dry. Call me a whacko leftist conspiracy theorist all you want, but this is real. World history has already been written (it’s in the books, folks, all there for you to see in black and white, if you dare), and by design, we’ve been tricked into allowing the worst parts of it to be repeated over and again.
Over the years, I’ve written extensively about my fascination with the U.S. government’s interference in leftist groups both here and abroad, so it should come as no surprise that Johan Grimonprez’s spectacular documentary Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat should receive considerable praise from me. Grimonprez presents his visually stunning video essay – about the overthrow and 1961 murder of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba and the U.S.’s attempts to use popular American jazz musicians as propaganda tools in the region – with such artistically-driven revolutionary fervor that one can’t help but clench their fists and stand up to the lies they’ve long accepted as truth.
By linking Khrushchev and Castro’s alliance with the many newly-independent nations across Africa and Asia to Malcolm X’s civil rights struggles here in America, Grimonprez expertly (and correctly) portrays the U.S. and its right wing puppet governments around the world as the true enemies of freedom. However, for the U.S., the Belgian government, and other capital-controlled powerhouses, decolonization was not an option. Instead of allowing the people of the Democratic Republic of Congo their freedom and autonomy, they plotted to overthrow and murder their charismatic and wildly popular leader, Lumumba. And they got a
Making matters even more unprincipled, was the idea to send jazz musicians like Louis Armstrong, Nina Simone, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, and others to the Congo to help gloss over the illegal U.S.-backed coup there. Unaware of their roles in the plot to overthrow Lumumba, these musicians quickly pushed back, even driving singer Abbey Lincoln and drummer Max Roach to loudly and disruptively interrupt a 1961 UN Security Council meeting where they demanded answers about the recently-murdered Lumumba.
But as Khrushchev, Castro, Malcolm, and Lumumba’s demands for decolonization from U.S. interests (in the Congo’s case, from the mining of the uranium necessary to make nuclear weapons) ultimately went unheard, their words and actions were recorded on film for posterity – including Khrushchev’s famous “shoe banging” incident. And as modern neoliberal capitalism enters its final death rattle, these words, spoken sixty-five years ago and now assembled in this wonderful film , remain prophetic and undeniable. They asked us to open our eyes then and we didn’t. I don’t think I have to tell you how crucial it is to do so now.
To learn more about how the U.S. government uses violence to maintain their capitalist grasp on people everywhere, track down Michael Apted’s 1992 documentary Incident at Oglala, Shaka King’s 2021 Fred Hampton biopic Judas and the Black Messiah, Raoul Peck’s 2021 docuseries Exterminate All the Brutes, and the Robert Evans podcast Behind the Bastards. Required reading includes Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and if you can find it, Agents of Repression: The FBI’s Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement by Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall. The latter changed my life forever when I read it as an eager 16-year-old in 1993 (given to me by my school librarian, who bought it to be loaned out to students but was told by the school board he wasn’t allowed to put it on the shelves).
James is a writer, skateboarder, record collector, wrestling nerd, and tabletop gamer living with his family in Asheville, North Carolina. He is a member of the Southeastern Film Critics Association, the North Carolina Film Critics Association, and contributes to The Daily Orca, Razorcake Magazine, Mountain Xpress, and Asheville Movies.