The Frenchman who pioneered the modern mercenary industry
nationalinterest.org
nationalinterest.org
It's not hard to predict, and mercenaries are hardly new. Don't let leaders at the time or now off the hook for not expecting it.
Wars have always resulted in unemployed soldiers that society either had to find work for, in peace or in another war, or they find work for themselves. From what I've read (not much) it was one reason for the Crusades - to give a lot of unemployed soldiers something to do, far away from home. People trained in Afghanistan by the US against the Soviets became Al Quada; Central Americans trained by the US in the 1980s became today's drug gangs; demobilized Iraqi soldiers became the insurgency and later many became part of ISIS. Many US soldiers from the War on Terror work for private contractors (at least some qualifying as mercenaries); many others come home and have a very hard time adjusting to civilian life, with tragically hide mental health and suicide rates as a result.
I thought that prohibition was much older?
Also, it's more complicated than that. For example, active duty were used in Little Rock during the civil rights era, IIRC?
Posse Commitatus Act of 1878. The Insurrection Act provides one statutory exception, which would have applied to Little Rock, but I’m not sure if that was the legal justification at the time.
Edit: indeed it was. Here’s the presidential order: https://www.eisenhowerlibrary.gov/sites/default/files/resear...
Note the references to authority granted US Code Title 10 Chapter 15 Section 332 which covers insurrection.
A militia force of about 3000 laid siege to about 156 Irish UN troops, who held out for 5 days before surrendering.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Jadotville
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Faulques#Congo_Crisis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Denard#Early_career
It's hard to confirm if he was there, Roger Faulques his friend and leader of the militia force certainly was.
Excellent film.
If I recall correctly part of the reason why mercenaries were excluded from Geneva Convention protections and banned via treaties was because of massive raiding, raping, and looting from continental rogue armies after their masters lost the ability to pay for them. That sort of "wildfire" and backlash made it acceptable to the nations to agree it would be better for them to not have it, similar to partisans and Free-Shooters.
While they may technically wind up working both for and against the countries involved if they were condoned or not hints at what sorts of conditions they would prefer both them and their foes to have. There were all sorts of politics involved in the treaty.
Even now PMCs are infamously "mercenaries but under offical backing of a recognized nation as opposed to any rando with cash".
On a tangent it brings to mind a silly mental image of a cartel or street gang aiming for lawful combatant status.
Could probably use an update post Afghanistan / Syria etc.
https://www.amazon.com/Modern-Mercenary-Private-Armies-World...
1 - https://www.amazon.com/Footsteps-Mr-Kurtz-Disaster-Mobutus/d...
I wish there were blog posts to go with the photos but seems like just images.
Maybe thats unfair and just "let the people decide" is the best method but 'wow!' am running adblock and that thing is still a sensory overload.
I know it is wrong to popularize such characters by making movies about them, but damn, such stories are interesting. I guess there is a reason bad boy stories (like Netflix's Narcos show) are popular
That is why the front page of a newspaper is filled with negative stories, gossips, murders, mayhem etc. Rarely does the front page features a doctor doing free surgeries.
There are plenty of popular bad guy stories, but I think that far overstates the case: The Bible and Quran are the biggest sellers and over a billion people (very rough guess) read them weekly, if not more often. Most stories, including in film, have positive protagonists. For action, consider LotR, superhero movies, etc. For history, most war movies, biographies, etc.
Maybe your queue is different? :)
People will watch a movie on mother Teresa as well as a movie on Hitler (or some other monster). But I bet a lot more people would be interested in the bad person movie. This doesn't mean that they are bad people, it is just that generally, movies on bad people are more interesting to the masses than movies on good people.
It is not my queue I am talking about (I watch good shows too). You can look at History channel, Netflix etc - and if you compare apples to apples, I bet movies/shows on bad people are a easier sell than movies/shows on good people.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078492/
Hoare was a British Colonel in WW2 who later became a mercenary that worked a lot in Africa, most famously defeating Che Guevara and the (monstrous) Simba revolt, freeing a group of nuns and other white prisoners that the Simbas were holding hostage and ultimately being instrumental in defeating the entire rebellion using some novel counter-insurgency techniques. Hoare would organize small squads that penetrated deep into rebel-held territory and destroyed supply shipments and laid ambushes for enemy soldiers. Basically a launching a guerrilla attack against the guerrillas themselves.
Fun Fact: The Simbas were almost comically evil -- they were communist cannibals that practiced ethnic cleansing of rival tribes (not uncommon in the various African revolts) and set up concentration camps (which was uncommon). They were famous for cutting out prisoners' livers and then eating the liver as the prisoner bled to death. They had a particular fixation for white nuns - there were many in Africa at the time - torturing, raping, and ultimately killing a large number. Some were held hostage for ransom from the West.
Fun Fact 2: Much has been said accusing Che Guevara of racism for insulting the capabilities of his black soldiers during the conflict, mostly blaming his defeat on the poor quality of his troops, and arguing that if he would have had enough cuban troops, he would never be defeated. While I think this is a bit unfair given today's hypersensitiveness, Hoare never complained about his black troops and in fact praised their heroism. Hoare was an excellent leader in the field and had a close sense of camaraderie with his troops, which you would need to be to launch small-man operations deep behind enemy lines.
There are many other stories about Mike Hoare. For example he was hired to launch a coup in some nation, but the plot was discovered and the government set an ambush for his men as they arrived in the airport. This ended up in a shootout at the airport, Hoare hijacked a plane, and flew it out of the country, landing his men in South Africa, where they were promptly arrested. Arrested, yet alive. Hoare served a brief sentence in jail for that.
Hoare died a happy death, in bed in his home in France in 2020, at the age of 100, a well-loved figure surrounded by fat grandkids.
There are many such adventurers that went to Africa -- it was, and remains in many ways -- the wild west. There you can launch coups, steal gold, fight for land. And especially during the decolonization period and its aftermath, you had a number of weak governments flooded with western dollars but no competence, so they hired western firms to do everything from build electricity plants to run their armies or set up a telephone service. Foreigners were not just hired to aid in supporting and opposing rebellions, they were brought into all areas, but the military aspects are the ones that create the best adventure stories.
who woulda guessed
I'm heartily sick and tired of the way white South African men are portrayed as the 'new bogeymen'.
Each country has its good and bad men (and women for that matter), and if you could do a census I can almost guarantee the distribution would follow the usual Bell curve.
Get your facts first, then you may distort them as you please.
PS: I'm a white South African male
I've met many pre-Apartheid white, South Africans who immigrated to London. And, wow, the racist shit they would say about black South Africans. Many found their racist attitude simply wouldn't fly in cosmopolitan London so they fled back to South Africa or Australia.
Of the younger generation many were too young to fully comprehend apartheid or denounce it entirely.
> Each country has its good and bad men (and women for that matter), and if you could do a census I can almost guarantee the distribution would follow the usual Bell curve.
South African apartheid was a giant state apparatus. It takes a lot of people contributing to uphold it. While no one likes to think they were in the bad guy group I'm thinking the bell curve is going to look like a slope given the testimony from T&R records.
Actually it really, really didn't.
Students of history will know that National Party (which assembled Grand Apartheid and ruled from 1948 to 1994) merrily gerrymandered the entire country on a scale seldom seem.
1. liberal (more English) areas like those near Durban were magically made part of conservative (more Afrikaans) farming areas hundreds of kilometres away. A good example is the affluent enclaves of Kloof and Hillcrest in Durban were somehow part of the [at the time] extremely conservative Voortrekker town of Greytown a mere 150km away;
2. a further law deemed that the rural votes in each such Frankenstein voting district counted 100%, the distant urban votes a mere 75%
3. this happened everywhere and ensured a massive majority for the National Party in every province;
4. there was by design - and in the most literal sense - no way for the white population to vote themselves out of Apartheid. It was so successful that for many years their was only ONE liberal opposition member of parliament [Houghton, Johannesburg].
I understand details are tough and cloud the cartoon good-vs-evil polemic you were no doubt exposed to. I guess one does get more dopamine from wild sweeping statements that reinforce and display your own ignorance and bigotry. I wouldn't use my real name either in posts like yours.
For the casual observer: let this be a cautionary tale when gerrymandering is attempted in your own democracy.
[PS. Southern Rhodesia - now Zimbabwe - had a different, but equally effective voting mechanism to suppress the growth of a liberal opposition. For another day ]
So the question is, did "a whole lot" of white people uphold a system of white supremacy in South Africa? Literally the only honest answer is, "Of course they did."
"Although the majority of whites supported apartheid, some 20 percent did not." That's from Wikipedia as cited below. If you have an actual source to support your absurd claim that the majority of white South Africans opposed Apartheid, I'd love to see it. The gerrymandering you mention at great (distracting?) length could have been real, and would have had nothing to do with upholding apartheid, which had the support of about 80% of voters.
Literally the entire state apparatus was dedicated to supporting apartheid, particularly the police (which kept non-whites from moving freely in their own country without passes), the courts (which punished non-whites for transgressions against the white state), and the military (which violently attacked and killed non-whites who could not be controlled by the police and courts). And all this in a country that was never more than 20% white in modern times.
> I understand details are tough and cloud the cartoon good-vs-evil polemic you were no doubt exposed to.
In the case of apartheid, good vs evil is exactly what it is. The white apartheid government, which had the support of 80% of white voters, was evil. And all the specious detail about gerrymandering won't make that go away.
Good news mate - you still haven't.
But nice try
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_South_African_general_ele...
God alone knows how they were going to enforce that in a completely multi-lingual society.
Strange times. A warning to us all.
the vast majority (> 80%) of eligible whites turned out and voted 68% in favour - with the gerry-mandered districts in my original post voting 85% in favour.
Thus supporting my original explanation that a cynically engineered voting system is incredibly advantageous to the incumbent and needs far fewer supporters than is often believed to maintain the status quo over a long period.
Sadly, some people just stopped thinking after the Spitting Image jingle.
And since its a mandatory part of the weird I-never-thought-I'd-see kubuki theatre on HN: to remove all possible doubt, Apartheid had no redeeming characteristics, was a completely evil idea, and only a fucking moron would defend it. Sigh
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_South_African_apartheid_r...
This stat seems to support teacherdan's point. Even at a time where it had become clear that the apartheid system could not continue (regardless of whether or not people supported it in principle), almost a third of whites votes to maintain it. In other words, a whole lot of white people supported apartheid right up to the bitter end, and that is one of the reasons that it was possible for it to continue for so long.
Also, the referendum appears to have been in 1992, not 1990.
Of course a hell of a lot of people supported it - most of them now long dead. [This mandatory prelude is so tedious]
However, as I have shown, clearly not enough that the ruling National Party were prepared to trust their own people with continuing to vote for it. An the 1992 referendum proved their suspicions to be correct!
Hence the outrageous - from the start - manipulation.
If you think banal voting manipulation isn't as big a deal as the evil that lurks in mens' hearts then ask yourself - now that Iran has an Islamic democracy (they do hold elections) how does the current/next generation ever return to a secular democracy via the ballot - if that is what they want?
As as in Apartheid South Africa, enormous effort has been made by the initial true believers to prevent it from ever happening.
I could be wrong.
>An the 1992 referendum proved their suspicions to be correct!
Well, sort of, except the National Party was campaigning for a 'Yes' [to end apartheid] vote.
I'm not sure how that minimised anyone who then voted "yes, I'm glad you are finally proposing that - its what I want"? Odd line to take.
But the Apartheid National Party did a lot stranger things than that - after a quick rebrand - they decided to merge with the ANC!
As I said - a complicated place.
Now it only happened because the evil party told them to and the world was forcing them to? So what ? They haven't really changed deep down? And the proof is somehow the absolute strangers in the minority who didn't change their mind?
I am going to have to call a halt to my participation here as: to quote teachrdan - is absurd.
The best that can be said is that once the imminent collapse of apartheid became obvious to almost everyone, a clear (but not overwhelming) majority of white people voted to get rid of it.
To me these facts are obviously inconsistent with the narrative that apartheid was an unpopular policy that persisted only because of gerrymandering and other electoral shenanigans. One can also look at polling and surveys to reach the same conclusion.
Ultimately I defer to the comprehensive TRC report. Here is an apt quote from the introduction to volume 4:
>An important debate with which the Commission had to wrestle was, as has been fully discussed in the chapter on The Mandate, how to paint the backdrop against which such human rights violations occurred. Without some sense of the “antecedents, circumstances, factors and context” within which gross violations of human rights occurred, it is almost impossible to understand how, over the years, people who considered themselves ordinary, decent and God-fearing found themselves turning a blind eye to a system which impoverished, oppressed and violated the lives and very existence of so many of their fellow citizens.
>It is an old question: one that is asked of any country that undertakes acts so foul that the world openly condemns it. It is a question that has been answered in different ways, for such is the nature of historical debate. However, what is clear is that apartheid could only have happened if large numbers of enfranchised, relatively privileged South Africans either condoned or simply allowed it to continue.
The government lied to everyone, and some believed it. You'd seemingly like to make a villain out of all white South Africans, but that's not helpful in any way - many, like myself, were born into apartheid and struggled against it. So were my parents - they had no part in making those laws, and yet were born before the Union was established. It's easy to miss what it's like to try to counteract a regime - you and your loved ones will suffer. The populace did not wield the power of transformation itself, it was international intervention that allowed it to happen.
Were some complicit? Yes, obviously. Did many know? Probably. Was it the majority that supported a status quo for some time? Yes, but not without being manipulated. It was standard education that there were 'grades' of people for most of the 19 and early 20th centuries, and in South Africa this was redoubled. Narratives like 'black people are the result of the snake and eve' were common. I've spoken to many older people who are horrified at what they believed. It's incredibly hard to escape a bubble when it's all you hear. State TV, state sanctioned news, international sanctions mean you didn't ever hear how SA was seen internationally. The TRC was asking people to recognise what it saw, and what many others saw - that evil is banal, and within us. It deliberately did not pursue further actions against those that were not directly involved in harm, or who ordered it.
You have taken 'large numbers' and seem to have interpreted it quite liberally to mean 'the majority', and then further concluded that there is then some obvious flaw in their moral character. I could say the same of the US forever wars and destabilisation, but would it help? To accuse and paint with that shame every citizen?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_South_African_apartheid_r...
It seems we are in agreement on the basic point. Bear in mind that at the beginning of this thread, throwaway210222 appeared to disagree with this point, and this is what I was responding to.
> You'd seemingly like to make a villain out of all white South Africans
> ... and then further concluded that there is then some obvious flaw in their moral character.
You're persistently reading things into my posts that I just haven't said. I haven't made any comment on the moral character of white South Africans as it's irrelevant to my point.
I really think that if you read through my posts again without the preconception that I'm trying to paint all white South Africans as inherently evil, you might find that you don't actually disagree substantially with any of what I'm saying.
As another poster put it, we must avoid the comforting fantasy that a system with millions of victims could have involved only a handful of perpetrators. The perpetrators were no doubt morally complex human beings like the rest of us, not evil caricatures. However, that does not mean that the fact of their participation in the system can simply be swept under the rug. Nor can the referendum vote – indeed an indicator of enormous progress – be used to show that the apartheid system did not enjoy wide support among whites in the preceding decades.
[1] Not all white people here are 'colonial' like you'd imagine - see the Highland clearances https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highland_Clearances
My singular observation has been that you seem to repeatedly wish to project a view that asks the audience to treat a group with suspicion and doubt. Based on their race and origin.
I think that's spurious, and as it applies to me and just about everybody I know, I know it to be patently false. My first-hand account also seems to be of no value.
A direct parallel would be like me propagating something negative or disparaging about Jews as a whole, due to my feelings about Palestine. I wouldn't do that, and I expect the same courtesy. Group biases are discrimination, and discrimination generally leads to collective punishment. None of these are good things, nor do they make better people of anyone.
It is obvious that not all white South Africans thought alike and that many opposed apartheid to varying degrees. It is also obvious that the vote to repeal apartheid was an enormous step forward. As I’m sure you’re aware, nothing I’ve written contradicts this.
I think trying to bring it back to "white people" when they overwhelmingly voted not to do that is disingenuous.
If North Korea can continue apartheid sure as hell could have. If you're willing to kill all the people to keep your power you won't need to. Compare, Stalin, Lenin, Gorbachev, Deng, Fidel.
While South Africa had the support of the United States, it was thousands of miles away from the US, and surrounded by Black African-run states that were hostile to it, particularly Mozambique and Angola. South Africa did not have the resources to run a North Korean-style police state.
It's your choice to believe something so stupid. But to propagate this racist myth of Hacker News is a profound act of intellectual dishonesty at best.
Your proof that most white South Africans opposed apartheid is that the 1990 referendum came out in favor of ending it? This vote took place after it was clear that apartheid had no future. The ANC (main black freedom party) was increasingly organized and powerful, while years of economic sanctions had taken their toll on the economy.
You claim that a majority of whites opposed apartheid the entire time. Then how could the system have persisted for decades?
> to remove all possible doubt, Apartheid had no redeeming characteristics...
This is a cheap trick performed by the right. They denounce an unjust system while minimizing anyone's participation in it. It's oppression without any oppressors. This is how the United States lionizes Martin Luther King while downplaying the white politicians and bureaucrats (like head of the FBI J. Edgar Hoover) who persecuted him every step of the way.
You may not be defending apartheid per se. But you are certainly defending millions of white South Africans who supported, enforced, and benefited from apartheid for decades, all at the expense of the overwhelming non-white majority. The fact that being reminded of their misconduct bothers you so much should tell you something.
---
Land ownership under apartheid limited Black ownership to just 7% of the country: https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/20/africa/south-africa-land-refo...
Three posts up, your only citation was to Wikipedia, claiming 20% of whites were against apartheid. But the paragraph in Wikipedia itself doesn't cite anything. I hope I don't need to say: Wikipedia is not in and of itself a source. Either they need to cite some sort of an underlying source, or you do.
The post I'm immediately replying to has one citation to a source about Black ownership of land. That's not what's under dispute here.
Can you provide some actual sources substantiating the claim of what percentage of whites actually did (or did not) support apartheid? Otherwise your posts are pure rhetoric.
Also note the striking statistic in the abstract: "...over 40% of those surveyed think apartheid was a good idea, badly executed." And this was a survey conducted in 1996.
a) surely you are familiar with error bars?
b) where did you think that 30% went?
I would be astonished if the poll said otherwise.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.
> Then how could the system have persisted for decades?
- surely I have explained at least one mechanism - in your words - "in distracting long detail";
- another one was to make sure no white kid ever learnt a black language. Most kids in the areas I spoke about above learnt French as a third language - not Zulu or even Hindi. This was deliberate;
- they went to enormous lengths to destroy any common knowledge of Sofiatown and it was a rejection of that the races could never live together. To show you what it meant: they renamed it "Triuph";
- they high-jacked the dominant protestant religion (ask Reverend Beyers Naude)
- in the mid 1980s the imposed a state of emergency that controlled all TV and news.
- any yes, like many places in the early mid 20th century - there were indeed a lot of racists.
But I suspect form the tone of your comments you aren't really asking in some good faith pursuit of knowledge of a complex place. I suspect you are rather employing a common rhetorical device to actually assert there "there other is no possible explanation - other than simple pure evil bigotry - for how it could continue for so long. And anyone who I feel doesn't agree with this is a bigot".
Its not cool and its not consistent with the site guidelines.
So let's discuss briefly the other Apartheid state - Northern Rhodesia. Here the whites-only voting was first-past-the-post as per the UK mother ship.
In all of the elections about 40% of the white population regularly voted against Ian Smith in just about all the districts. They won exactly ZERO seats in parliament.
40% is not "a few" people.
Voting structures matter and they get high-jacked. Look after yours.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Please leave out the victim rhetoric, which is a very tired and worn tactic; it's just personal attacks in reverse. Nothing in the GP was an insult. If you have a point to make, say it.
> the cartoon good-vs-evil polemic you were no doubt exposed to
I was a child before apartheid was abolished. And growing up in the US I knew it was wrong and knew any government that supported it was wrong. It seems the BDS campaigns were effective on small kids of that time. Honestly, who would justify apartheid.
But based on the casual conversation with a few South Africans of that era I knew some actively benefited from it. A memorable one being with a soon retired office manager and ex SA military who had some ideas on what he would like to do to Nelson Mandela. How things were better before the ANC took over; kind of "the trains running on time" mindset.
I went to school in the US. We were told slavery was unpopular but politically immovable. We were also told the civil war wasn't about slavery. Turns out it was popular and the war was absolutely about slavery. So it does color my opinion when others tell me something unethical was unpopular but politically immovable.
Don't get me wrong, I am sure the vast majority of South Africans, English and Afrikaans, are decent enough people. It's really just that the "it wasn't all of us, it was those really bad people over there" is a part of the whole Lost Cause thing. Sorry.
SA is in a hard place, with the US having used all the good rationalizations over the last 150 years, as well as the example of how Germany dealt with its Nazis.
New boogeyman? The malign influence of whites in Africa is not a new phenomenon. The statement you took issue with is true.
Of course, nobody reasonable would suggest that all whites in Africa, or that all white South Africans, are bad people, but it's disingenuous to dismiss historical facts about what white people have done in Africa on the basis that it hurts white people in Africa's feelings.
For what it’s worth, in the popular consciousness outside of SA, the white South African as a bogeyman probably peaked a long time ago, I would say around 1989 — when Lethal Weapon 2 was released with South Africans as the bad guys.
So if all of the men being discussed had a hat with a propellor on it, we should be careful to avoid saying so, because there are also innocent unrelated men who wear propellor beanies?
If a disproportionate ratio of those men are all from the same relatively small demographic in a relatively remote location, it should not be off-limits to notice that.
I’m at least aware of the issues with SA, but I must point out that the article didn’t say that they were white. Without knowing more about the people involved, I certainly didn’t make that assumption.
(Otoh I didn't know that a SA white bogeyman was a thing, so what do I know.)
After the fall of apartheid the new democratically voted for (black) government came into power, meaning that the old government, military, police, municipalities etc. faced pressure in replacing all the previous white employees with new black employees.
That meant that those white people needed to start finding new jobs. For your general office worker from a municipality or a low level policeman that meant transitioning to something else, such as generic office job, learning new skills such as using computers etc.
But for your extreme specialists, for example from the Army Special Task Force, they often had advanced training and skills which they didn't want to trade for an entry level position somewhere. That meant translating those skills into something new, such as (mainly) local security companies (to combat the new rise in crime in the country); but also as contractors such as named in the article.
Even the article itself isn't focused on condemning the individual contractors, it's merely stating that the creation of these private armies are raising hard questions around their use, liability and who they need to be accountable to.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
* I'm sure you didn't mean to be or experience yourself as posting aggressively. The problem is that there isn't much difference between "defensive" and "aggressive". Mostly we experience ourselves doing the former and other people experience us doing the latter. Everyone functions this way, which is how we get flamewars where everyone feels like the others (a) started it, and (b) did worse.