Liberating the Heart of Africa: A Case Study of the Classical Monkey Syndrome
Posted Oct 21, 2011

Liberating the Heart of Africa: A Case Study of the Classical Monkey Syndrome


by Dr. Robert D. Crane  


    We finally now seem to be militarily committed to chase down the Lord’s Resistence Army as an opening to liberate the Heart of Africa.  The Neocons did not create AfriCom in 2007 under President Bush for nothing.  It is responsible for all of Africa, including Libya, but excluding Egypt.  Unfortunately not a single one of the 57 African countries has been willing to host it, so it is based in Stuttgart, Germany, where for a couple of decades or longer we have had no business having any troops either.  Africa has a lot of natural resource wealth, which, of course, is rightfully ours as a reward for liberating Libya and its oil for humanity.  Our presence in the center of what for years has been considered a “world war” for the heart of Africa is strictly humanitarian, according to Obama. 


    Once we are committed to this world war, it will be harder to get out than it has been in Iraq and Afghanistan.  When I was Director of Third World Studies at the Hudson Institute in the 1960s, I was in charge of writing scenarios for the DOD designed to justify our invasion of nine different countries.  The Congo was one of them, so I have been following events there for many years.  Strangely, I never had to write scenarios about how we could get back out again.


    The present situation is particularly dicey because it now involves the new country of South Sudan (which for decades I have always called Anzania) and all its oil, for which China is now a competitor.  I doubt that China will take American intervention lying down.  Following Kissinger’s favorite strategy of global condominium from the Cold War era, however, the United States and China may simply divide up Africa the way the European powers did in 1875. 


    Alternatively, the two might opt to share Africa in order to save the world from chaos.  Unfortunately, the Chinese would have a huge strategic advantage because, unlike us, the Chinese are not paranoid about chaos and would have perhaps lethal bargaining power.  Unfortunately, the NeoCon strategists cannot conceive of such subtle factors. Furthermore, the NeoCons’ autistic combination of existential angst, hubris, and arrogance is incurable, because no paranoid person can admit one’s own paranoia, just as almost by definition no arrogant person can admit one’s own arrogance.  The result is the classical monkey syndrome of being deaf, dumb, and blind, which is why justice, especially economic justice as the prerequisite for democracy, has been a hopelessly exogenous variable.