[2009 Jan] Ben Affleck,
Rwanda, and Corporate Sustained Catastrophe by Keith Harmon Snow Since 2001,
actress Angelina Jolie has been UNHCR’s ‘Goodwill Ambassador,’ a role that took
her to eastern Congo in 2003 and 2004. Jolie traveled in eastern Congo with
intelligence insider and International Crisis Group agent John Prendergast, who
is aligned with a growing army of ‘Save Darfur’ cloned organizations that deploy
state-of-the-art media technologies to undermine and co-opt any true grass roots
movement to legitimately empower African people. Jolie also starred as a
‘selfless’ hero working as a UNHCR official in Hollywood’s Beyond Borders,
a film that peddles the necessity of mixing Central Intelligence Agency
gun-running operations with humanitarian missions—because it is ostensibly for
the ‘right’ cause: Western sponsored covert interventions.
Hollywood stars from the film Ocean’s Thirteen
formed another ‘humanitarian’ organization that inevitably throws celebrity
raised funds at the western structural violence and white power economies
focused on sustaining disaster in Africa. The governing board of Not On Our
Watch includes Ocean’s Thirteen stars George
Clooney, Brad
Pitt, Don Cheadle, and
Matt
Damon—Ben Affleck’s
buddy ‘Will’ from the film Good Will Hunting—and producers Jerry
Weintraub and David Pressman.
Clooney recently joined John Prendergast, a U.S. National
Security apparatus insider, and Hollywood producer David Pressman to pen a
Wall Street Journal Op-Ed, opining all the usual trite platitudes—but
absent a single recommendation of substance—about how President Obama can help
Congo. Prendergast, who is billed as a ‘leading American human rights activist’,
has previously boasted of traveling around Sudan and Central Africa with
President Paul Kagame, and he is named as one of the early architects of the RPA
coup d’etat in Rwanda.
The entire exercise of appointing and fronting Hollywood
celebrities as United Nations ‘Messengers for Peace’ and ‘Goodwill Ambassadors’
is a further means by which the establishment whitewashes the war-making and
plunder of multinational corporations, and the individuals responsible for
carnage the world over, and to more deeply institutionalize the structural
violence. Described as ‘helping to shine light on the world’s trouble spots’,
celebrity actorvism is more like a cop shining a bright light in your eyes so
that you are disoriented, confused and blinded.
Privatizing the ‘humanitarian’ sector through media
celebrities or through entertainment and publicity extravaganzas—like ‘Food AID’
and ‘Band AID’ and ‘Not on Our Watch’—that falsely claim to benefit African
people, simultaneously lets governments off the hook, obscures the true intent
of predatory capitalism, and creates personality cults that further entrench
white ‘society’ pathologies of obliviousness, ignorance, goodness and supremacy
[2009 Jan] Ben Affleck,
Rwanda, and Corporate Sustained Catastrophe by Keith Harmon Snow
