Today in labor History January 17, 1961: The CIA orchestrated a coup that tortured, murdered, and overthrew Congo’s first democratically elected president, Patrice Lumumba. This was after a previous failed coup against him by Mobutu Sese Seku, who would later become dictator from 1971 until 1997.
Congo won independence from Belgium in 1960, after years of brutal colonial rule which slaughtered up to 10 million people, or half its entire population. However, imperial powers continued to exploit the people of Congo, even after independence. President Eisenhower authorized the assassination of Lumumba because of his ties with the Soviet Union. The U.S., and its European allies, wanted control over Congo’s resources, particularly its rich uranium deposits, both to fuel their civilian and military nuclear programs, and, in particular, to keep them out of the hands of the Soviet Union, which was allied with Lumumba.
The wonderful 2024 documentary “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat” does a really great job of uncovering the concealed history of the 1961 assassination of Lumumba and the coup d’etat in Congo. But it’s really about so much more: Cold War machinations, propaganda, and covert operations; the superpowers’ jockeying for control of puppet regimes and spheres of influence in the global south; the Pan-African movement; racism in the U.S., the Civil Rights movement, and the repression against it; and, of course, jazz music, including tons of interviews and live footage of Lumumba, Ghanian president and revolutionary Kwame Nkrumah, activist and writer Andree Madeleine Blouin, Malcolm X, Louis Armstrong, Nina Simone, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Miriam Makeba, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, surrealist artist Rene Magritte. There’s even a “slumber party” with Fidel Castro at Malcolm X’s home, in New York, after the U.S. authorities convince all the hotels in New York to refuse Castro a place to sleep during a UN conference.
One of the people the CIA used in its early attempts to assassinate Lumumba was chemist Sidney Gottlieb, who ran the agency’s secret MKULTRA mind control program. Gottlieb tried, but failed, to kill Lumumba with poisoned toothpaste. He also tried, and failed, to assassinate Fidel Castro with an exploding cigar and with radioactively poisoned shoes. MKULTRA was a continuation of Nazi mind-control experiments, which utilized mescaline against Jews and Soviet prisoners, hoping it could be exploited as a “truth” serum. The program gave hallucinogenic drugs, like LSD and Mescaline, to 7,000 unwitting U.S. war veterans, as well as many Canadian and U.S. civilians.
Lumumba in 1960, with glasses and a bowtie. By unknown photographer / Anefo - http://proxy.handle.net/10648/a9c3a120-d0b4-102d-bcf8-003048976d84 Nationaal Archief, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63950207
Today in Labor History October 27, 1967: Catholic priest Philip Berrigan, along with artist Tom Lewis, writer David Eberhardt, and Rev. James L. Mengel III, who was a United States Air Force veteran, occupied the Baltimore Selective Service (i.e., draft) office, where they poured blood on Selective Service records to protest the Vietnam War. They came to be known as the Baltimore Four. Berrigan said that their act was meant to protest "the pitiful waste of American and Vietnamese blood in Indochina." In 1973, Berrigan was excommunicated for marrying a nun. For 11 of the 29 years they were married, he was in prison for Civil Disobedience against the Vietnam War and nuclear weapons.
The Catonville Nine anti-war activists, including Philip Berrigan, in the Wilkens police station, Catonsville, Maryland, on May 17, 1968, photographed by Herald Argus newspaper reporter Jean Walsh soon after their arrest. By Jean Walsh - Friends of the Catonsville Library, Baltimore County Public Library, Catonsville, Maryland. Image from Fire and Faith: The Catonsville Nine File, DigitalMaryland.org, Enoch Pratt Free Library/State Library Resource Center, http://c9.digitalmaryland.org/artifact.php?ID=CLCN008&VW=S, accessed 17 June 2020., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=91227313
#RIP my faithful old #Seagate 2 TB #HDD in my Tower. You dun did good... 2015 - 2025.
It's had failing sectors for many months, but til today my Tower has still run ok, with its #SSD holding my #ArchLinux#KDEPlasma + #SparkyLinux#Cinnamon#dualboot systems, + all my "important" data, & the HDD used for the #Timeshift OS snapshots for each penguin, + all my #QEMU#KVM VMs. It's the latter i shall miss, coz i really did like to play with myriad penguins there, via my plethora of VMs.
Today the next giveaway that the HDD was getting worse was an unexpected failure of #BackInTime to run [for my weekly Sparky data b/u], & upon investigation i realised that the HDD filesystem had gone "read-only", which is never happy news. I finagled BiT to run after all, by excluding the few HDD directories that were borking it, then ran updates for Sparky, then rebooted.
This time i booted into #Arch... or at least tried to, but after stalling for yonks trying to mount the HDD, it gave up & took me to the rescue screen. Ah, so the HDD really is now piston broke, pity. In this tty I edited Arch's /etc/fstab to comment-out the lines mounting the two partitions of the HDD, rebooted, & this time successfully into Arch. As i'd been in Sparky for a couple of weeks, i wanted to run Arch's overdue updates... oh nice; ~2.5 GB, zowie.
Rebooted again, this time choosing Sparky, but just like Arch, & this time as expected, the circus repeated re the rescue screen, where i then ofc also edited Sparky's fstab, rebooted, & Sparky now also ok. Wanna use Arch again for a while, so yet another reboot back to there... i've missed my fabbo #Plasma!!
Tangential Thoughts:
For a couple of years i have been getting increasingly interested in the #immutable#atomic Plasma distros, eg, #Kalpa, #Kinoite, & most recently of all, #KDELinux. In fact, a week ago i converted my Lappy from #LMDE6 to Kinoite, & have been planning/researching the eventual possibility of also bunging an atomic onto Tower.
If Tower had been already running one such, & today's scenario had unfolded, wouldn't i have been entirely stuffed? Is /etc/fstab also immutable in Kalpa, #Kinoite, & #KDELinux? How would i have been able to boot, today, if not for the comparatively trivial fstab edit?
I am a historian of nuclear science & technology at Hiroshima Peace Inst & Grad School of Peace Studies. My book Nuclear bodies: the global hibakusha (Yale 2022) surveys harm from #nuclear production, weapon testing, & reactor accidents across the globe, & medical models that obscure harm from fallout particles.
Collecting oral histories in 20+ countries , I examine how communities, families and interior psychology suffer via exposures.
I track nuclear #colonialism (selecting the irradiated) arguing the #ColdWar was a limited nuclear war against these populations.
I also explore our relationship to our HL nuclear waste, asserting it is how our descendants will know us. Our choices now reveal our lack of consideration of the 1000s of generations of living beings for whom this waste is already a part of their world.
Previous life: l was a chef & worked w/ #organic food