TEAM TACKLES CONNECTICUT RIVER IN SWIM FOR CONGO

keith harmon snow, consciousbeingalliance

Keith, Alex and Arsenio about to begin on at 1:45
pm on 31 August 2013.

On Saturday 31 August 2013, as severe electrical storms raged over the Connecticut River in southern Vermont, New Hampshire and Massachusetts, three CONGO SWIM supporters set off from Springfield Vermont to support the CONGO SWIM initiative with the goal of reaching Bellows Falls (VT), ten miles down the Connecticut River, in solidarity with the people of the war-torn Great Lakes of Africa. 

The swim began with overcast skies, severe electrical storm and flash-flood warnings, and in Springfield VT there was intermittent lightning and a growing northerly headwind.  Two miles into the swim the waves were getting bigger, with small rolling whitecaps impeding the lone swimmer Keith Harmon Snow and kayak-support Alex Viandes.  By 5:00 pm -- after about five miles into the swim, serious thunderstorms had set in, and the northerly wind and waves were substantial.

This initiative was inspired by the CONGO SWIM initiative, where other people have been swimming or offering some action to support the people of Congo through Friends of the Congo's projects. Congo swim was founded by swimmer Keris Dahlkamp, who began his 22 mile swim of Lake Tahoe on August 24, 2013 and completed it the next day.

This swim was for all people of the Great Lakes of Africa countries: the peoples of Burundi, Congo, Rwanda and Uganda; and for the people of Ethiopia and Sudan. These are all places where Keith has worked and where he fell in love with the people and land.  The US military and its allies are behind massive violence and plunder in these countries, and the western media continues to obscure reality and blame the victims, and this is true of progressive media too.  This swim was also for the survivors of radiation poisoning due to the nuclear poisons complex.

Keith Harmon Snow began swimming from Springfield VT at 1:50 PM, with Alex Viandes paddling a kayak with him.  Arsenio Ferreira, an Angolan national, began running from Springfield VT and he joined the team on the CT River and began swimming with Keith about four miles downstream from Springfield VT.

CHRISTIAN SAVIORS & THE ADOPTIONS INDUSTRY IN CONGO EXPLOITING AFRICA'S MOST PRECIOUS RESOURCE: CHILDREN

Jennifer Fierberg & Keith Harmon Snow
Conscious Being

All those that are justified, God vouchsafed, in and for the sake of his only Son Jesus Christ, to make partakers of the grace of adoption, by which they are taken into the number, and enjoy the liberties and privileges of the children of God, have his name put upon them, receive the spirit of adoption, have access to the throne of grace with boldness, are enabled to cry Abba, Father, are pitied, protected, provided for, and chastened by him as by a Father, yet never cast off, but sealed to the day of redemption, and inherit the promises as heirs of everlasting salvation.

The Baptist Confession of Faith, 1689

"The fact that people are starving to death, or unable to provide for their children, due to a system of international plunder, does not justify purchasing children from desperate people and trafficking them abroad into the homes of white people.  The wars in DRC are part of the global business where the most expendable are lives of poor Congolese."  

Congolese Professor in the USA (name withheld)

La Procure Saint Anne is a Catholic Monastery built in 1920 in what is today the Democratic Republic of Congo.  Abutting Kinshasa's first cathedral church, La Centre d'aceuil Saint Anne (in the local French) sits just off Kinshasa's main thoroughfare, the Boulevard 30 Juin, named for the date of the Congo's supposed independence from Belgium on June 30,1960.  

At La Procure Saint Anne you can see black Congolese 'orphans' meeting prospective white American 'parents' before these children are packaged for export, with all the requisite paperwork and necessary U.S. Government approvals, and trafficked into international commerce for transshipment to the United States. Cloistered behind 10-foot stone walls, with a lush tropical garden in front and a shady courtyard in back, La Procure sits just a few hundred feet from the United States Embassy. 

No longer a mainstay of the Belgian colonial enterprise, La Procure is now run like a tight profitable business.  The original, quaint, simple but truly charming colonial era furnishings, which were evident throughout the austere halls of the monastery even as recent as 2006, have been replaced by tacky furniture and cheap post-modern décor with as little character and as much charm as the cold business dealings of the head priest.  Listed today as a lower- to middle-range lodging option in the city, these days La Procure accommodates foreign couples for weeks at a time, generating substantial income, especially in Kinshasa.

CANADA IN THE WARS IN CENTRAL AFRICA: Genocide and Looting of the Congo's Natural Resources Through Rwandan Intervention

A new book by Patrick Mbeko released 12 May 2012.

Read the Preface in English by Keith Harmon Snow here.

Conscious Being Alliance

PREFACE

In the late spring of 1991 I crossed Uganda on a mountain bicycle and slipped into the eastern Congo, then known as Zaire. I was not interested in politics then, knew nothing about race relations or imperialism and, certainly, nothing about genocide. Africa was an adventure to find and experience life amongst tribal cultures and wildlife I'd seen re-presented in the National Geographic Magazine. After a few safaris in Kenya and Tanzania and after summiting Mount Kilimanjaro (covered white with glaciers at the time) and inspired by the portrayals of Africa I'd seen in the western media imagination, I set out for the "heart of darkness": Zaire.

In western Uganda I passed through Lake Victoria National Park but there were few animals to be seen. Uganda had suffered a bloody cataclysm due to the previous decade of war, 1980-1990, which today (as then) is described as a "civil war" involving African tribes. The bloodshed was spawned by the victorious National Resistance Movement/Army (NRM/A) under the command of Yoweri Museveni, Uganda's "president" for the past 24 years, and it was backed by Anglo-American interests, but I neither knew nor cared about any of this. I also did not then know the name Paul Kagame, the so-called "president" of Rwanda, who has led a dictatorial regime in Rwanda since 1994, when the Museveni-Kagame axis seized power by coup d'etat. Kagame served as Yoweri Museveni's Director of Military Intelligence and, along with his commander and many others, is responsible for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in Uganda as the NRM/A fought its bloody way to power (1980-1985) and then ruthlessly consolidated that power (1985-1990).

In 1990, Major General Paul Kagame had been receiving military training in the United States under the Pentagon's elite psyops (psychological operations) and counter-insurgency programs at Fort Leavenworth Command and General Staff College in Kansas, USA. In September Kagame was flown back to Uganda to assume command of the guerrilla army that invaded Rwanda on October 1, 1990. Given what Maj. Gen. Paul Kagame has done in Uganda (circa 1983-1988), Rwanda (1990-1994) and Congo (1995-2010), the only meaningful interpretation of the terminology "psyops" and "counter-insurgency" would be to define this as training in scorched earth terrorism, torture, assassinations and mass murder. Advancing their military campaigns from Uganda to Rwanda to Congo, Kagame and Museveni have never diverged from their path: the modus operandi has always been absoluter terrorism and mass murder to depopulate the land, eliminate the claimants to that land, and control or plunder its resources.

Your World News Interview with Keith Harmon Snow The Politics of Genocide

Interviewed 19 October 2011 in College Park, MD, by Professor Solomon Comissiong of Your World News.

conscious being

Genocide in Rwanda is a complex event that has been reduced to few soundbites:

* 100 Days of Genocide from 6 April to 15 July 1994.
* The Hutu tribe butchered the Tutsi tribe.
* Senseless, mindless, African savagery.
* We knew (Clinton knew) and we did nothing.

Such is the established and official narrative.

The real story is far more complex. The U.S. military was involved. The U.S. proxy forces -- an English-speaking Tutsi elite who invaded from Uganda -- killed Hutus, they killed Tutsis, they facilitated the "genocide" against innocent French-speaking Tutsis, they killed Tutsi recruits who came to join them, and they committed genocide against Hutus from the first day of the invasion, 1 October 1990, and through the so-called 100 days, into the present. The killing continues. The mythology continues. The impunity continues.

LESLIE'S GHOST: Imagine no possessions.

Some reflections on self and other, life and death, discovery and lostness, simplification and complexity, the Congo and the United States, in the age of superfluous junk and meaningless suffering.

keith harmon snow
13 March 2013 consciousbeingalliance



Leslie's dead.  It's fifteen below zero.  Ghost is on the porch, shivering in the excitement of stalking the squirrels under the bird feeder. Still a young cat at six months, Ghost is the only thing at Leslie's old house that does not reek of decay or entropy. His being is still unfolding, a little white joy on four legs. He freezes, one leg in mid-air, when the squirrels look up, and then he advances, in inches. Dad and I watch him from the kitchen as he plots a massacre.

In the whiteness of the blizzard, and in the sunshine after, the white Ghost is invisible. It's only when he looks at you that you see him - and then you see that he has one blue eye and one green, and in these eyes a look of innocent wonder. The squirrels are alert, they clutch their seeds and split them on hind legs, and one day Ghost will fly off the porch and sink his teeth into a squirrel and the blood will spurt out and freeze bright red on the white snow and on the snow white face of Ghost. The world stops for Ghost when he sees a squirrel; raw instinct overpowers his consciousness, kind of like truth and justice blinded by a flag.

Dad calls him Mouser Cats and when he hollers: "Where's the mouser of the houser?" Ghost comes running. To me he has always been the Ghost. Equally inquisitive as frightened by my arrival -- a stranger coming into the heated refuge of Leslie's haunted house - he now climbs into my lap and drapes his body over my arm while I write. Maybe he remembers me.

"Everyone wants that cat when I leave," dad tells me. (I had instantly decided Ghost would be mine.) Leslie died two weeks before I came and so Dad will have to leave this house in a few months. "But I don't know what I'm going to do," he says. "I won't take the cat with me."

Ghost came from me. Last summer I let a homeless man I know pitch a tent in the field where I run an organic garden. Tim was a 24 year-old nomad, and he reminded me of me at 19. He was living on the streets of Northampton, two kittens in a brown paper bag, and one day I picked him and a girl up hitchhiking, two kittens in a brown paper bag. He showed up in our field and pitched a tent, ready to change the world. The kittens adopted me while Tim was at work each day, sleeping in my teepee and hanging out with the summer interns and pooping in the ashes of the fire pit. I told Tim to take some responsibility; that coyotes will eat the kittens, that they need a home and my teepee isn't it. He disappeared after that, on the bicycle I gave him, abandoning kittens and tent and rotting food and pornography -- and the other refuse of his alcoholism. When I left for Congo I gave the kittens to dad, and he brought them here to Leslie.