Who Killed Hammarskjöld? the UN, the Cold War, and White Supremacy in Africa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A. Susan Williams. Who Killed Hammarskjold? The UN, the Cold War, and White Supremacy in Africa. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.Reviewed by Howard A. DoughtySometimes there are just too many conspiracies. When that happens, the forces of evil in the world get together and work out the details of a sinister plan. They prepare to use all means at their disposal, including lethal force when necessary, to cover their tracks. Usually it is sufficient to use their pawns in the corporate media to persuade a nervous public that the problem lies with conspiracy theorists and not the conspirators. These conspiracy theorists are presented as paranoids, who are just a degree or two of delusion away from UFO abductees and Loch Loman monster sighters, not to mention people who swear they've seen Elvis in the sportswear department of their local Wal-Mart. Which local Wal-mart? Why the one in Edmonton, Alberta or East Sandusky, Ohio. It doesn't matter. They're all the same.I should know. I am a firm believer in the idea that, from time to time, governmental agencies, criminal organizations and small groups of extremists (separately or in concert) decide to assassinate certain people and successfully carry out their plans. I first became committed to this view on 22 November 1963. Although unaware of their identity, I instinctively knew that had executed John F. Kennedy. Today, I still have no idea which particular villains killed him. The list of suspects is impossibly long. It includes business executives-largely, though not exclusively, Texan oil millionaires-who were disturbed by Kennedy's modest attempts to control prices in major US industries, rogue CIA agents in company with Cuban exiles who had not forgiven him for failing to provide air strikes in support of the absurd adventure in the Bay of Pigs, Southern racists angry at his belated backing of local civil rights leaders and ubiquitous outside agitators, FBI agents carrying out the orders or the intimations of Kennedy-hater and Bureau Director J. Edgar Hoover, gangsters upset with JFK's choice of mistresses (they don't like to share), or military officials who had concluded that he was having unwarranted second thoughts about US intervention in Vietnam. Some people (I'm not one of them) even put future presidents Johnson, Nixon and the elder Bush on the list. My conviction that Lee Harvey Oswald was a patsy was confirmed, by the way, in 1965, when I met his mother. I looked her squarely in the face and asked her calmly but firmly whether her son had assassinated the president. She looked me squarely in the face and calmly but firmly replied: No, Lee didn't do it. Why should she lie?Less than five years later, I was working late in my office in the Department of Political Science at the University of Hawai'i, when a friend who was a CIA operative (honest!) showed up at my door. He was carrying a bottle of Canadian whisky. Instinctively I reached into my cupboard for two glasses and only when he started to pour did I notice that tears were streaming down his cheeks. His visit was not a friendly gesture toward an amiable foreign visitor. He had come to lament the execution of Robert F. Kennedy earlier that evening. In time, I concluded that the shooter in this case was indeed a young man named Sirhan Sirhan. I remain unconvinced that he acted alone.The slaying of Dr. Martin Luther King also disturbs me. Most people, when reflecting on such killings think that it would be difficult to organize a group of people, direct them toward a murderous end and successfully cover it up. I, in the alternative, think that the idea that a lone gunman would embark on such a venture without symbolic and material assistance is even more unlikely.I find it odd that people are willing to believe almost anything conspiratorial in spy novels, films or television dramas, but they won't risk believing that such things happen in real life. …
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".