Without us, conditions will decline rapidly.” Speaking about apartheid-like Rhodesia, one US mercenary explained that “what we have here is an ideal core of white people who are able to raise the standard of living among the Africans. The notion that American men had a “duty” to fight in southern Africa had obvious racist and paternalist undertones, and white mercenaries from the United States did not shy away from making them explicit. After Vietnam and Angola, we can’t afford to lose any other countries.” I consider it my duty to fight in Rhodesia. If they’re too scared to fight the Communists, then people like me have to act independently. “The West isn’t doing its job,” one American mercenary lamented. When the CIA had mounted a covert action against Angola’s Marxists in late 1975, Democrats in Congress shut it down within a few months. The state appeared both unable and unwilling to reverse the spread of communism in Africa. That alone troubled right-wing Americans. But perhaps even more disconcerting was the response of the US government, especially the CIA, which had been hamstrung by a series of scandals and investigations that rocked the intelligence community in the mid-1970s. If it fell, then communists would take over, as in Angola. The growing war - coupled with US, British, and UN sanctions - imperiled Rhodesia’s future. Buckley had even helped organize a propaganda campaign known as the Friends of Rhodesian Independence, which worked hand in hand with the Rhodesian government to popularize Rhodesia’s cause in the United States. Rhodesian prime minister Ian Smith famously called his country the “ultimate bastion against communism on the African continent,” and many leading US conservatives agreed. Rhodesia’s war was especially concerning. In Rhodesia, a white-supremacist state that broke from the British Empire in 1965, two guerrilla armies, supported by the Soviet Union and China, were pushing the government to the brink of collapse. In the former Portuguese colony of Angola, which gained independence in 1975, the Cuban- and Soviet-supported Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA) had seized power from rival nationalist guerrillas, igniting civil war. The Americans who took up arms in Africa in the 1970s looked out on the world and saw the Soviet Union and its allies on the march, making great strides towards world domination. “We Can’t Afford to Lose Any Other Countries” And the ideas and impulses that animated these American mercenaries helped generate new forms of privatized warfare. Drawing upon arguments pressed by US conservative leaders, they enacted a shadow foreign policy that linked overseas conflicts to domestic struggles, leaving legacies that resonate today.Īlthough most US mercenaries had a marginal impact on the wars in Rhodesia and Angola, the circulation of violence - both real and imagined - between the United States and southern Africa helped radicalize domestic paramilitary groups in the late 1970s and early 1980s. But the story of US mercenaries in Africa shows that right-wing Americans were also part of a larger international anticommunist mobilization that spanned the Cold War era. The rise of the Right is usually told as a domestic tale. By picking up arms, these men hoped to continue their wartime crusade against America’s enemies abroad while reclaiming the economic and social power they believed they had lost to African Americans, women, and other groups at home. Convinced that the US government was too weak to counter the spread of communism in southern Africa, they took matters into their own hands. In the late 1970s, about four hundred white American men, mostly Vietnam veterans, traveled to Rhodesia and Angola to fight as mercenaries.
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