The death knell of NATO’s mercenaries in Kursk can be traced, via Hollywood’s Blood Diamond movie, all the way back to Rhodesia’s Bush War.
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The death knell of NATO’s mercenaries in Kursk can be traced, via Hollywood’s Blood Diamond movie, all the way back to Rhodesia’s Bush War, where Rhodesia’s SAS, their Selous Scouts, and their Rhodesian Light Infantry, arguably history’s best and deadliest special forces ever, won all their battles, and, according to themselves at least, killed up to 15,000 insurgents, whilst suffering only 85 KIAs themselves.
Although the 1st Battalion The Rhodesian Light Infantry (the Saints) can be seen here displaying their colours on their final parade, which was held on the 17th October 1980, their legacy is very much alive amongst NATO’s Special Forces. That, at least, is the testimony of Jim O’Brien, a senior officer in the U.S. Special Forces, who pays tribute at 59:41 in this video salute to Rhodesia’s Selous Scouts commandos on their 50th anniversary.
Although Robin Moore’s The Crippled Eagles tells the story of the 500 or so Americans, who fought for Rhodesia in their Bush War, it should be noted that most foreigners, the Americans in particular, were often more trouble than what they were worth, as their desertion rates often hit 80%.
One major exception to this were Leka Zogu‘s highly trained Albanian Royalists, who were delighted to join the Bush War on the off chance of killing Communists. That said, the meat and bones of those commando units were Rhodesians who, like the Boers and German East Africans before them, introduced their own novel fighting techniques to Africa’s battlefields.
Following the 21 December 1979 Lancaster House Agreement, which ended the Bush War, many of Rhodesia’s commandos joined South Africa’s 32nd Battalion, where they were to the fore in propagating Operation Winter, South Africa’s border wars, before moving on to Executive Outcomes, one of the trail blazers in NATO’s burgeoning modern mercenary industry.
And that is really where Hollywood came to their rescue, first with The Wild Geese and then with Leonardo DiCaprio’s Blood Diamond, both of which indirectly adulated the fighting prowess of Rhodesia’s Special Forces. This is most obvious in this Rhodesians never die clip, where DiCaprio wastes too many African rebels in seconds flat for us to even count.
Executive Outcomes was the high point of the mercenary cottage industry, and Mark Thatcher and other connected chancers tried to get in on the act by getting these Rhodesians and South Africans to engineer coups in Equatorial Guinea and other soft targets. Whereas Albania’s Crown Prince Leka was at least willing to waste Africans himself, folk like Mark Thatcher, Margaret’s little baby, figured it was much better to get demobbed Rhodesians and South Africans to do the killing for him, and to rationalise this, these gangsters used DiCaprio’s revolting This is Africa (TIA) line from Blood Diamond.
If Africa was a gold mine, Iraq was El Dorado and Dick Cheney’s Halliburton was amongst the White House connected companies that made a literal killing there on the backs of untold millions of Iraqi dead. Cheney’s basic trick was to deregulate the American military, and outsource as many of their functions as he could to his money hungry buddies. Although denuding the American military of much of its critical mass made the command, control and coordination of its remnants much easier, just as with Rome and its Praetorian Guard, so also was there a change of focus with the American military and its Praetorian Guard from defending American “values” to robbing all round them.
Although America continues to rob Syrian resources and loot their artifacts to this day, their scam is even more obvious in Libya, where they ran away not only with Libya’s oil, but with its vast financial reserves which, like those of Iraq’s, were robbed and sequestered away, far from the hands of those Arabs, from whom the Americans robbed them.
Regarding Ukraine, the Russians, it seems, were the party poopers, and proof that all good scams must come to an end. The original plan with Ukraine was that creeps like Zelensky would sell its resources to today’s Mark Thatchers and Dick Cheneys at dimes to the dollar, and that today’s reincarnation of the Wehrmacht and the Rhodesian Special Forces would, between them, sweep in and cleanse the land of anyone who objected.
Things, alas, have not worked out that way, and the Russian Armed Forces are even more of an impediment to their eastwards advance, as other, equally eclectic forces were to the northern advance of South Africa’s fearsome 32 Battalion.
All that said,our old American transexual friend Sarah Ashton-Cirillo, who is now back to being a boy, is still singing the praises of Zelensky and his fellow pick pockets, and good on him/her for that. There is, however, one big fly in his/her ointment, and that is the Russian Armed Forces, who may not be as forgiving with him/her as they were, when they captured British mercenaries in June of 2022.
Sweet Banana
But we’re all Rhodesians and we’ll fight through thick and thin
We’ll keep our land a free land from the enemy coming in
We’ll keep them north of the Zambesi, till that river’s running dry
And this mighty land will prosper, for Rhodesians never die
As we look back from Ukraine’s pyre at the ghosts of Rhodesia’s Special Forces, their songs are worth commenting on, and not just this ultimately pathetic little ditty that we could happily jive the night away to. Though Rhodesians never die is not a bad little number, even if its concept of “a free land” has little resonance beyond Cirillo and O’Brien’s Special American Forces, for me Sweet Banana, when sung here by Rhodesia’s African auxiliaries, is the cream of the crop even if, as in Zulu, they have a good bass section but a dearth of top tenors.
Hollywood’s lipstick aside, wars in Africa, Ukraine or anywhere else are not glamorous affairs. Though NATO, Hollywood and Leonardo DiCaprio may like to sing that Rhodesians never die, Kursk and areas contiguous to it are showing the Russian Armed Forces are forcing them to change their tune. After so much blood, death and destruction throughout Africa, Ukraine and the Arab world, NATO is out of road, and the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army should also give them pause for thought in Asia. The days of NATO’s Wehrmacht and Wild Geese popping their sitting ducks are over, and a new day, free from NATO’s psychopaths, beckons, and not before time.
