Conscious Being Alliance: September Update & Appeal for Your Support

16 September 2011
keith harmon snow

Hello:

Would you please take a few minutes to read this personalized appeal?

My work may seem remote to you, but it is not remote to millions of people in Central Africa struggling for basic human rights. I began this work 20 years ago, without knowing what I was doing, and one of my first stories, "Crossing Mobutu", appeared in Mountain Bike magazine in 1994, the year now inaccurately associated with genocide in Rwanda. The central character in "Crossing Mobutu" was your fearless foreign correspondent, on a bicycle, and there was a rickety little man in a ragged blue shirt and tattered trousers, Yafali Kulu Kulu, and a black mamba snake.

Yafali saved my life, and maybe I can find the story and post it, because it's an exciting read, and it tells you how I became involved with Central Africa, and this was long before cell phones and laptop computers and all these techno-gadgets that are impossible without the minerals being plundered from Yafali's land.

But Yafali Kulu Kulu and his entire extended family are dead now, and that's why I am making a film about THE POLITICS OF GENOCIDE.



We need financing for the web site, and our graphic designer (volunteering his time and talent) has produced about fifteen mock-ups for the home page, like the one above -- a rough mock-up that won't be used.

This is real independent journalism, it's not frivolous, and I need your help. This work is hard, emotionally and spiritually, and I have cost of living expenses, filming and interviewing expenses, and general office operations and overhead, and I need to eat, and the constant challenge of the powers that be (and all they have to cover up).

At present I am also writing up the results of the investigation I did into minerals plunder from Congo based on the explosive documents I obtained in Tanzania in May: expect this publication in print shorty. This is cutting edge work, and I am about to name and quite roundly embarrass some powerful individuals and multinational corporations. Just yesterday I received a note from a Congolese man who says my work comes up everywhere, all the time.

KEITH HARMON SNOW!!!! You're everywhere, man, like in that song of Johnny Cash [I've Been Everywhere]. You come up all the time. I even had a falling-out with a woman's friend for questioning some of your analysis of Dan Gertler. Can u believe that? She thinks I'm sold out to Kabila... Of course, I bought Jason Stearns book.  ... He's already a marker in the history of the Congo -- just as you, man. Believe me, man, you're like a Congo expert now... Can u believe it, this woman stopped talking to me because of you!!!

I also need financial support to cover legal costs in a free speech issue where my rights have been infringed upon.

To top off the challenges of the past year, I spent hundreds of hours working to protect my self, my family and community from the onslaught of two private military companies using assault weapons and detonating explosives at an illegal weapons range near our homes. It was stressful, frightening, costly, unpaid work, unavoidable and unrewarding. It was hell. The local police were involved. These guys worked for Blackwater, and they routinely kill people in Iraq and Afghanistan. This was really, really hard on my family and I and there's been a lot of harassment and retaliation and it's not over.

And that is why I am asking you to please make a donation to support my independent work. I can't proceed without your help, and I am not ready to quit. My bank account is empty and there's no one to borrow money from, no trust fund, nothing to sell. Here are some different needs:

Documentary Film and Book Project: $500 for web site design; $350 to recover last week's expenses to detour a renowned Ugandan dissident journalist, who is exiled from Uganda, to my Massachusetts studio for a full day of interviews; $300 to cover upcoming interviews scheduled in Baltimore and New York;

Free Speech Legal Fund: $500 for legal fees;

General Support: $200 for computer repairs and maintenance this month alone; $500 for hard drives to store and process digital film; $200 a month in electricity, phone and Internet service;

If you are Congolese or Ugandan or Burundian or Rwandan, please share this request with others and encourage people to donate right away! If you are English or Canadian or French or American or Spanish -- please do the same! If you are an expert on some aspect of the topic(s) of the documentary, please feel free to communicate with us as we'd love to consider collaboration with you; quite likely we just haven't gotten to you yet.

Please donate through PAYPAL at Conscious Being Alliance or All Things Pass

Or mail your check direct to:

keith harmon snow: 6 Hyde Hill Road, Williamsburg, MA 01096.

Everything helps. Can you make a $1000 donation? $500? $100? If you can only support us at the $50, or $20 or $10 level, please do. If you can't make a donation, can you arrange a speaking venue at a college near you? Can you send a book for the Congo Books project? Can you organize a fundraiser for our film? How can you help? Thank you so very much. And thank you to those who have supported me in the past in financial and other ways. And please spread the word.

Love,

keith

P.S.: I am presenting at the University of Maryland October 19, 2011:

THE POLITICS OF GENOCIDE:
White Supremacy Ideology, Corporate Control, and the Plunder and Depopulation of Central Africa