Watching Denzel Washington scene-steal his way through Malcolm X (1992)

#film #movies #MalcomX #SpikeLee

Today in Labor History September 14, 1960: Mobutu led a coup in Congo, against president Patrice Lumumba, just months after winning independence from Belgium. Lumumba was later executed. During years of brutal colonial rule, the Belgians slaughtered up to 10 million people, or half Congo’s entire population. However, millions more died under the Mobutu dictatorship, which lasted from 1971 until 1997.

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 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, and he attempts to camp out on the sidewalk with his contingent.

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.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #congo #belgium #lumumba #coup #cia #malcomx #fidelcastro #communism #socialism #soviet #russia #ussr #imperialism #nuclear #atomic #coldwar #jazz #mkultra #hallucinogens

I've been listening to the Imagine An America podcast (from the National Civil Rights Museum), and there have been some thought-provoking discussions so far, but I really enjoyed the interview with Spike Lee. Check it out for yourself:
https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/imagineanamerica/episodes/Audacious-Artivism-Telling-Our-Stories-through-Film-with-Spike-Lee-e34nog9

#SpikeLee #podcast #NationalCivilRightsMuseum #blackfilm #MalcomX #blackkklansman #ImagineAnAmerica