Noah Colwin

proxies.

The two main pieces I would say are first that like the nation of Angola and the people of Angola suffered enormously.

And the legacy of that suffering – I mean we're talking about a conflict that at some points in the late 80s and early 90s was considered perhaps the deadliest in the entire world.

Wow.

um thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of people dying whether it's from malnourishment um or disfigurements from land mines um it is not a conflict people many people know about it's a conflict i certainly knew very little about uh until we began researching and and really and learning about uh it for the season

And so I think that just the first piece of the legacy that's with us is that this is a country, like many other poor countries in the world, that has been wounded by the legacy of nationalist and anti-imperial struggle, frankly.

And then the second piece of it, I would say, is that Angola today and or at least the the way in which the, you know, actions and the legacy of things like Angola operate and as pertains to sort of why Ryan asked me on, I think is not something just about Angola specifically, but about something that it represents, which is how America involves itself in foreign conflict to advance a perceived American interest.

which in the time of the Cold War was often structured around and had this huge anti-communist ideological component, as well as obviously rank material interest, if we want to call it that.

But it is, I think, if you look at the Angola story and you trace the lineages of it, obviously you arrive at very strange and weird facts, like the fact that Jeffrey Epstein was involved with corporations that had been arming Angolan rebels before.

Obviously, Southern Air Transport did a lot more than just Angola.

But also it's about, you know, how even when these wars are over, when there's money to be made, when there's tons and tons of money to be made, particularly in diamond smuggling in the case of Epstein.

The ways in which, yeah, even if the conflict is over, we've moved out, we've pulled up stakes, we're no longer supporting our proxies, we've fucked things up enough or destabilized them enough that some of the world's historical villains who walked the earth until pretty recently are able to profit immensely from it, like Jeffrey Epstein.

Well, at that time, it was a very – I mean I actually think that's a good – before I jump to the point of the direct response to what you're just saying, I do want to respond to what you were saying a bit earlier about the legacy of the Cuban intervention, which is absolutely right and probably what I should have led with, which is that –

the cuban intervention which is there's not really a precedent for the historian pieroglasis whom we interview in the show he's the the the eminent historian um having worked through the archives of south african cuban and american governments to sketch a portrait of these 15 years um in his book visions of freedom

You know, he calls it the one time in history that a poor country comes to the defense of another poor country and that it was successful that the Cubans helped the Angolans not merely outlast, but successfully repel South Africans.

It was one of the decisive, you know, like.

uh it was one of the decisive it's indisputable uh factors that led to the south african apartheid regime ultimately agreeing to to to end itself you know there was a there were a number of other factors there was um and what is still not so well understood in the west today um a functional civil war and a violent insurgency being led against the white rule against white rule within south africa um but

The the Cuban victory at the city of Cueto, Conavale, you know, where you have Fidel Castro issuing battlefield commands, you know, over the phone.

It's it's an astonishing scene.

And it was a it was an unbelievable at the time.