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It always amazes me how quickly some members of our population will point the finger at the United States intelligence services as the root of all evil plaguing Africa. Most recently, it was the whole ‘The Public Protector is a CIA agent’ scandal, but a more persistent rumor is that the CIA created HIV/AIDS. An extension of this theory is that the CIA also had a hand in creating Ebola to ‘kill Africans,’ or at least create a pretext in order to send troops into those countries the west wishes to ‘recolonize.’
As per usual, a cursory investigation would dispel even the least fanciful of these conspiracy theories. The plain truth of the matter is that it was the Soviet Union’s own KGB that planted the disinformation in the third world’s media outlets, while some mystery remained about the emergence of HIV, using local Communist Parties in a grand scheme named, in a manner not too far from a James Bond novel, ‘Operation INFEKTION.’
The Russians’ wrongdoings came to light in March 1992, when their intelligence chief [and later Prime Minister] Yevgeni Primakov stated that the disinformation service of the KGB had fabricated the story about AIDS virus originating from a US military laboratory as a biological weapon. The Russian newspaper Izvestiya also reported at the same time that: [Primakov] mentioned the well-known articles printed a few years ago in their central newspapers about AIDS supposedly originating from secret Pentagon laboratories. According to Yevgeni Primakov, the articles exposing US scientists' 'crafty' plots were fabricated in KGB offices.
The whole affair of the South African finger pointers reminds me of a quote from JM Keynes that, tailored to our political situation, would read, ‘The ideas of Soviet propagandists, both when they are right and when they are wrong are more powerful, in South Africa, than is commonly understood. Indeed, the country is ruled by little else. Practical South African leaders, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually slaves of some dead Soviet propagandist.”
Conspiracies of international meddling in our internal affairs give us comfort, and help us escape some of the responsibilities for our own failures. However, blaming powerful, international forces for sabotaging each and every endeavor in the absence of any supporting evidence only serves to promote the idea of a country and continent that repeat the same unthinking slogans generation after generation. And where has that taken us?
