“the sucking vortex where Africa’s heart should be”

Alex Perry is a truly world class buffoon, but his idiot racism has given my dissertation the above phrase; it’s a too-good-to-have-written-it-myself illustration that the savage whose claims to “distant kinship” strikes Marlow as almost too ugly to acknowledge in Heart of Darkness still beats his tom-tom in the psyche of white people too ugly to realize they see themselves when they look at “Africa.”But this, truly, is the kind of world class racism that Time magazine hasn’t really produced since the 1960’s:

If you want to see what’s wrong with Africa, take a trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo. The size of Western Europe, with almost no paved roads, Congo is the sucking vortex where Africa’s heart should be. Independent Congo gave the world Mobutu Sese Seko, who for 32 years impoverished his people while traveling the world in a chartered Concorde. His death in 1997 ushered in a civil war that killed 5.4 million people and unleashed a hurricane of rape on tens of thousands more. Today AIDS and malaria are epidemics.

As Julie Hollar of FAIR pointed out:

…if you’re going to charge Congo with being “what’s wrong with Africa,” you’d better give credit where credit is due. Independent Congo didn’t give the world Mobutu; that gift belongs to the U.S. and Belgium, who supported the overthrow and assassination of democratically-elected Patrice Lumumba and helped prop up the horror that was Mobutu for decades afterward.

Prompting Perry himself to show up in comments and issue some of the most delightfully self-righteous nonsequiters attacking Hollar and the other commenters who found him to be a racist buffoon (among which, for example, we have: “The idea that the US created Mobutu and maintained him in power belittles Africans and is typical of the kind of racism that dogs analysis of Africa”). A Tiny Revolution has really done good work here demonstrating that pretty much everything Perry says is not only demonstrably false but easily demonstrated, as has Africa is a Country.