Carlton Meyer, “The American Empire Invades Africa” (Tales of the American Empire, 11 June 2020)
Former US Marine Corps member Carlton Meyer recently created a series of several short videos, uploaded to Youtube.com, telling the history of US political, economic and military interference in the affairs of nations and continents around the world. In this 11-minute video, Meyer as narrator introduces viewers to a brief and occasionally quite detailed survey of US military activity in the African continent since the end of the Cold War in 1989 through US Africa Command (usually abbreviated to US Africom or just Africom), one of several regional command organisations of the US military. Starting with US general Wesley Clark’s list of seven countries whose governments had to be overthrown in the space of five years (after the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City in 2001) as home base, Meyer traces the downfall of governments in Somalia, Libya and Sudan (three nations on the list) over a 20-year period. During the 1990s, US activity in Somalia (with Ethiopian assistance) removed a legitimate government in the form of the Union of Islamic Courts and prolonged an ongoing civil war among various clan-based groups in that country, with the result that Somalia became impoverished, huge numbers of refugees fled the country over the years, and political and economic instability still plague that part of Africa to this day. In 2011, NATO overthrew Colonel Muammar Ghaddafi’s government in Libya and likewise that nation, once Africa’s wealthiest country and formerly one of its most stable, is now poor and unstable, with the western and eastern parts of the country opposed to each other and fighting an ongoing civil war. Sudan was subjected to a forced separation of South Sudan from its territory in 2011 in order to weaken the Sudanese President Omar al Bashir; the President was finally ousted after nearly 30 years of rule in 2019. Since its creation from Sudan in 2011, South Sudan has endured several years of civil war, human rights violations, political instability, poverty and the degradation of the cultures of the various Nilotic peoples living within its borders as people flee overseas from continuous war.
Photographs, maps, news reels and even archived news reels, combined with Meyer’s even-toned voiceover, create a straightforward factual narrative detailing overwhelming American imperialism and violence in destabilising African nations. The influence of Africom throughout the continent and the extent of its activities, involving the US National Guard from all 50 states in the Union, are demonstrated in the video’s ultimate centrepiece: a visual advertisement created by Africom itself detailing its activities and the colossal scale of these activities, employing at least a thousand US troops and others, in nearly all African countries except Egypt (part of US Centcom, centred in the Middle East). There is no need for Meyer to say anything about Africom at this point: the marketing is blunt and says all that is needed to say.
Wisely Meyer does not go into too much detail in this video as the target audience (the US general public) is not likely to know very much about US military activity in Africa generally and needs a general overview of the history of such interference. There are online resources for those viewers who want more information and information in depth on particular topics covered in the video. Being a military man, Meyer passes over other forms of US domination (financial, cultural, political, economic) over African countries. He says nothing about how the US became involved in African affairs, how it might have originally supported French and British colonial ambitions in the continent and then taken over once France and Britain left the continent in the 1960s. The video best serves as an introduction to a topic that rarely gets any mention in mainstream news media outlets.