Convenor with Dr Shihan DeSilva at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies. This seminar series provides an opportunity for Fellows and Students at ICwS to share and discuss with each other their work in progress on subjects relating to the Commonwealth and its concerns. The spirit is informal and friendly and everyone is welcome, including scholars outside the ICwS community. A needed corrective. Hard to explain the Napoleon-love on the Right, other than that words like "...

Skin Colour in Ancient Greece: The Insertion of a Non-Existent Colour Prejudice into Antiquity. - Maya Aziz Bad Guy? Actually just a naïve simpleton, a stooge, of a sort that was not unknown in those days. Like another woolly-headed fool that we’re coming to shortly: Henry Wallace. I, too, traveled the pipeline from Libertarianism to the Far-right via Objectivism. Although I didn'... Though at first I didn't like the sort of scattergun approach.. I grew to appreciate it as it almost felt like the author was making sure I was paying attention. As a child of parents born in the middle of all that was going on I found myself tracing the many dates to where my family was, or what my parents must of been doing at whatever age they were, etc. which I enjoyed. I enjoy history and enjoyed learning more about the details of what was happening.. maybe my personal infatuation with understanding more about my home country led it but I was ready to learn more. The appreciation I have for Nkrumah and those who did what they could for the democratically elected leaders of the DRC has grown. There are always times you learn about people in high or low spaces that play a great part.. passionately defending the truth no matter what the consequence to be is admirable.It is clear that the CIA had been investigating ways of killing Lumumba for some time, including raiding the house in which he was sheltering in Stanleyville after Mobutu’s coup, or poisoning him with botulinum, to mimic the effects of diseases common in Congo. The latter was part of the operations of Stanley Gottlieb, a chemical specialist who worked with the CIA on a range of possible technologies for ‘assassination or incapacitation’, as well as even murkier technologies like mind-control drugs (p.506). It was Gottlieb who worked on the various toxins the CIA plotted to use against Castro. Villains in the book include many of the famous apologists for the Stalin era, including Walter Duranty, who spent years denying the famines and death squads in his reports to the New York Times. Harold Laski is here, too, crueler and snider than he’s usually portrayed. He has to be there; after all, he was Ayn Rand’s model for Ellsworth Toohey in The Fountainhead. [2] The Secret Archive: What is the significance of FCO’s ‘Migrated Archives’ and ‘Special Collections’? A photograph from January 1975, reprinted in Telepneva’s book, shows Neto, Roberto and Savimbi at the signing of the Alvor Agreement, which set the terms for a transitional government in Angola: an arrangement that split power equally between the three liberation movements. Any hope of peace was shortlived. In a closed session of the Soviet Solidarity Committee in June 1975, Petr Manchkha, another second generation mezhdunarodnik and head of the Africa section of the International Department, argued (correctly) that the MPLA was caught up in a ‘serious international imperialist conspiracy’ involving the US, South Africa and Zaire. On 14 October, South Africa launched a full-scale armoured invasion from South-West Africa (now Namibia). Instead, the reader will be surprised to find an extremely detailed micro-history of events in the Congo (and to a lesser extent, Ghana) from the Ghanaian independence in 1957 to Nkrumah’s removal/exile in the early ‘70s, with a whole lot of Patrice Lumumba in-between. And that’s all fine and dandy, but what’s with the extremely misleading title?

Who Killed Hammarskjold? The UN, the Cold War and White Supremacy in Africa, 2nd edn with an additional chapter co-authored with Henning Melber and David Wardrop Congo was therefore at the centre of the U.S. neocolonialisation strategy, in which it wasn’t necessary to maintain an explicitly colonial regime to reap the benefits of being a colonial power. As Nkrumah explained, in this neocolonialist reality, ‘the state which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside’ (p.363). The U.S. was not the only aspiring practitioner of neocolonialism. Former colonial powers, after all, commonly expected to be able to maintain their interests in their former colonies. For example, the Belgian settlement for Congo expected Belgian companies to be able to go on exploiting Congolese resources as they had always done. The resources that the U.S. put into this were, however, extensive.So to the free-thinkin’ Michael Malice, whites are treated easily in America and Jews are endlessly persecuted.

Hour long in-depth telephone interview with broadcaster Paul Daniel on Canadian radio: Accessible Media Inc. (AMI) This does not appear to be the behaviour of a power concerned solely to prevent the USSR from gaining more influence in Africa. In fact, it is clear from Williams’ account that the U.S. would have behaved in a similar fashion if there had been no Cold War and no Russian menace at all. The problem from the U.S. point of view was not the USSR, but the threat posed to U.S. interests by movements which weren’t going to be satisfied with neocolonialism but which wanted genuine independence. Racism and imperialism give impetus to oppressed peoples all over the world. I think it will have worldwide implications and repercussions–not only for Asia and Africa, but also for America … At bottom, both segregation in America and colonialism in Africa are based on the same thing–white supremacy and contempt for life (p.13).To Williams, I give the highest compliment I can give: I wish I had written this book!’ — Kim Scipes, Countercurrents

In November 1959, the CIA created a dedicated Africa division. According to British researcher Susan Williams, the CIA's brief in Africa was to, by any means imaginable, secure American power across the continent. Napoleon Bonaparte killed so many White men that the French are shorter today than they should be. (... In connection with the publication of her book Who Killed Hammarskjold, Susan was interviewed on Newshour, BBC World Service. Convenor with Dr Mandy Banton, of one-day international conference to mark the 50th anniversary of UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld's death, 2 September 2001. The conference was organised jointly with the Dag Hammarskjold Foundation, Uppsala, Sweden, and the United Nations Association of the UK, Westminster Branch. The evening before, a welcoming event was hosted by the Swedish Ambassador, Ms Nicola Clase, at her official Residence in London. The additional chapter co-authored with Henning Melber and David Wardrop is entitled: 'Update: Journey for Truth -- from 2011 to 2016'; Hurst (UK) and Oxford University Press (USA)The good parts make this book worth it, though. The sections on how the US covertly and overtly abused the United Nations, for example, we’re eye-widening to say the least. The CIA, in partnership with a Swiss company, sold encryption devices to dozens of nations at the UN, which secretly allowed them to spy on sensitive conversations among senior state officials and diplomats for decades. In addition, the FBI subjected UN workers in New York to extensive interviews, anti-communist probing, and surveillance, despite the UN’s extraterritoriality and with blatant disregard for the UN charter.