Supposedly the Medal of Freedom allows the occupant of the White House to award “an especially meritorious contribution to the security or national interests of the United States, world peace, cultural or other significant public or private endeavors”.

In the latest news, however none of those concepts seem to apply to a golf player named Gary Player who is set to be awarded this supreme award. The primary explanation of his selection seems to be in this sentence:

Trump played with… Player last fall at his private club in northern Virginia.

Who is Player? What is he known for besides playing private club golf with someone in the White House?

The African Book Publishing Record (Volume 34, Issues 1-4 – Page 13) says he was

…often used by Pretoria as a virtual roving ambassador of apartheid…

“Selling Apartheid: South Africa’s Global Propaganda War” explains this in more detail on page 52:

By 1981 Player was widely confronted for his ongoing propagandist role promoting apartheid rule, according to “Off the court” by Arthur Ashe and Neil Amdur, page 147:

Gary Player, a South African, says, “I’m a golfer, not a politician,” when the media asks for his views. He’s a hypocrite. I would like Gary Player to address himself to the question of whether he favors apartheid or not — a simple yes or no would do…

This came as Player responded to sanctions against apartheid in 1981 by establishing his “Million Dollar Challenge” tournament in Sun City and inviting Americans to invest. When I say responded to sanctions, here is what Bishop Tutu said (quoted in the 5-20-1981 “Statement to International Conference on Sanctions Against South Africa”); the environment where Player conceived his new event was clear:

Those who invest in South Africa should please do so with their eyes open. They must not delude themselves that they are doing anything for the benefit of blacks. Please let us at least get rid of this humbug. They must understand that they are buttressing one of the most vicious systems since Nazism.

Perhaps it should have been called the Most Vicious System Since Nazism Challenge?

In 1987 Player was still being condemned for breaking boycotts of apartheid, internationally known for his continued high-profile role promoting white supremacist government. He is listed by name in the “Centre Against Apartheid, Department of Political and Security Council Affairs” report on page 11:

The Guardian provides a succinct note on Player’s reputation over time, in a 2007 story about Nelson Mandela distancing himself.

Mr Player is not known for his sensitivity to the plight of the downtrodden. He described apartheid South Africa as “maligned, misunderstood, pilloried” after he was heckled while playing abroad.

He was closely tied to the ruling National party during the 1970s as a member of a clique that launched a pro-apartheid newspaper with the help of illegal government funding.

He has also been criticized for failing to speak up on behalf of his country’s best-known golfer of Indian descent, Sewsunker “Papwa” Sewgolum, who was forced in 1963 to stand in the rain to accept a major trophy because he wasn’t allowed inside the racially exclusive Durban Country Club. Mr Player later said he welcomed Mr Sewgolum playing in South African tournaments because he brought “colour” to golf.

Adding confusion to the history, is Player’s own version, where he sees himself as a change agent (claiming in 1961 he asked for Mandela to be set free although not jailed for life until 1964, and that in 1971 he formally asked for apartheid in sport to end). Compare that to his habit of using Mandela’s voice for non-change, pushing the program of reconciliation instead of equality after apartheid.

• CBC interview: “I said, ‘I have so much admiration for you.’ I said to him, ‘It is remarkable, how can you not have revenge?'”
• TimesLive interview: “I said ‘Mr Mandela you must hate white people and have tremendous amount revenge’. “He said ‘to the contrary‚ I have no hatred and no revenge…”

He also complained in 1993, quoted in “Golf’s Global Ambassador from South Africa“, that as someone from a “brainwashed” white supremacist background he found it unfair to be expected to change and oppose apartheid if American golfers weren’t facing opposition to the Vietnam War.

Instead of explaining why this illogical whataboutism by Player is so morally bankrupt, perhaps I only need to point out how the official history of Pebble Beach indeed recounts 1972 opposition to the Vietnam War in the face of Nicklaus and what he thought of it:

Overall, while Player clearly has tried for decades to rehabilitate his image after gladly becoming the internationally condemned face of an apartheid regime, later acting as if he had actually wanted to be a change agent… he also very much became a fan of weak reconciliation after apartheid ended, preserving white economic domination and losing the support of even Mandela.

Seems like a “nice guy” opportunist ambassador who has been more than willing to go along with whatever regime or leader can make him rich quickest.

Just not seeing his qualification for such an award. As Maria Farrell explained recently:

The moral hazard is clear; why would anyone do the right thing from the beginning when they can take the money, have their fun, and then, when the wind changes, convert their status and relative wealth into special pleading and a whole new career?

I guess the next question, given his profile, is whether he was involved in the NRA campaign to funnel guns defeating the UN boycott, or involved in Ronald Reagan’s aborted Seychelles coup involving golfers of the “Ancient Order of Froth Blowers”.

Those gun-running high-dollar events fit perfectly and could at least explain the white nationalist White House today rewarding him for some long clandestine security angle. He may have been playing a role to help massage American business interests through and around the global apartheid boycotts (per the Nixon-era white nationalist “Tar Baby” foreign policy as described in 1976).

I’m being told a hidden science laboratory has been revealed deep inside an American corporation, tasked with finding a final solution to the problem of staff productivity loss from illness.

As weird and twisted as this may sound for a national healthcare system to be so deficient that a self-interested empire builder has an illness laboratory, it’s entirely true.

Amazon is working on a cure for the common cold in a years-long, top secret effort called “Project Gesundheit,” according to three people familiar with the effort.

It’s secretive because a search to cure the common cold would obviously make everyone very sick if they found out, right? And these people leaking details definitely are not trying to slow or stop its progress before it’s too late.

I mean of course Amazon’s CEO dresses like the villain in an Indiana Jones movie and calls his secret research to eliminate unfit workers Gesundheit…

A tragic day in America as the White House occupants have openly stated they’re actively manipulating coronavirus case numbers for political reasons.

…[He is as or more] concerned about the political fallout of the growing number of coronavirus cases in the United States as he is about how those cases should be handled. […] {His] concern is just that numeric increase, a concern that has no other apparent root besides his insistence that his administration is keeping that particular number low.

Sounds like an obsession with appearance, and no concern for people who will die. In other words it suggests numbers everywhere are being cooked by this administration because they love power, hate science and believe gambling with other peoples’ lives has no consequences.

Some also are reporting that warnings by intelligence professionals to the White House of the pandemic risk to America… were ignored and the office leadership fired.

Stanford lecturer Brett McGurk cited a document from the office the Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats’ 2019 “Worldwide Threat Assessment,” which specifically warns of a disease like the coronavirus.

Low numbers of cases doesn’t even mean things will be better for those reporting them, since they sit on an exponential curve early in the spread cycles. Here you can see Michael Lines graphing the similarity in rates:

“Data is beautiful” on reddit offers this graph, which indicates the US being slow on response and failing to test means it is ramping quicker than countries that tested early and often:

Any country having only 50 cases on the same day that Korea has 5,000, for example, could indicate Korea is 15 days ahead on a single contagion timeline. They’re linear numbers following the same line not running in parallel.

WHO has stated these three factors are most important to containment:

1. sufficient testing to identify the infected
2. isolation and treatment of infected once identified
3. tracing anyone who had contact with them

So the real questions right now are what testing capability has America demonstrated relative to number of cases it has reported on the shared timeline (sufficiency), and how early did the testing start relative to the case numbers (enabling isolation and treatment during spread to contacts).

The answers are that America’s federal government not only is intentionally cooking its numbers to artificially keep numbers reported low, it’s also been dangerously slow to deploy test kits that would be able to prevent thousands of deaths in America.

…the country’s true capacity for testing has not been made clear to its residents. This level of obfuscation is unexpected in the United States, which has long been a global leader in public-health transparency. The figures we gathered suggest that the American response to the coronavirus and the disease it causes, COVID-19, has been shockingly sluggish, especially compared with that of other developed countries. The CDC confirmed eight days ago that the virus was in community transmission in the United States—that it was infecting Americans who had neither traveled abroad nor were in contact with others who had. In South Korea, more than 66,650 people were tested within a week of its first case of community transmission, and it quickly became able to test 10,000 people a day. The United Kingdom, which has only 115 positive cases, has so far tested 18,083 people for the virus.

That’s a disaster, and it seems to be an intentional one. The US government is likely to get a lot of Americans killed. Already confirmed cases have exploded after the White House literally said (not a joke) that we should expect cases soon to go to zero.

Appointing Pence, who infamously bungled his state’s AIDS crisis, is only going to make the numbers games worse (like most White House appointments so far, including the newly appointed CDC head infamous for believing a virus is God’s punishment).

In Seattle, a hot spot of the virus where a dozen people already have died, only about 100 tests were done across an area with greater than 3 million people.

It’s truly bizarre to run America completely blind like this, unless you think back to how badly President Reagan infamously intentionally delayed and suppressed national virus numbers and response while thousands were dying.

To be clear, scientists today refer to the COVID-19 a cross between AIDS and SARS. That makes it especially important to reflect on an American President in the 1980s who intentionally hamstrung the CDC and blocked scientific response to AIDS.

I’ve written about this before, in context of the “executive privilege” stain from anti-science extremists in American politics (including present Supreme Court Justice Roberts, adviser to Reagan during the AIDS crisis):

One of the most prominent stains on the…Reagan administration was its response, or lack of response, to the AIDS crisis as it began to ravage American cities in the early and mid-1980s. President Reagan famously…didn’t himself publicly mention AIDS until [Sept 17th] 1985, when more than 5,000 people, most of them gay men, had already been killed by the disease.

Reagan’s first public address on the subject came even later, captured in a story about the White House turning down pleas for help from political backers with the virus.

President Reagan did not give his first major public address on the disease until …May 31, 1987 — well after the number of AIDS deaths in the United States topped 25,000.

Italy, with its high fatality numbers serves for most countries as a foreshadowing of what’s to come with COVID-19. That country is now predicting 18,000 people hospitalized in Lombardy region in a few weeks, of which they expect 3,000 will require intensive care (that’s 10 times Italy’s current capacity).

However, Ronald Reagan and Justice Roberts perhaps are an even better foreshadowing of what’s to come with COVID-19 in terms of America’s lack of transparency and overly political approach to healthcare, downplaying fatalities or even ignoring them altogether.

In the early stages of the AIDS virus thousands were dead and yet the Reagan Administration sat opaquely disbelieving, refusing to give scientists a voice and devaluing American lives. Cooking the numbers during that crisis quickly resulted in high fatality rates into the tens of thousands, with nearly 700,000 Americans in total killed since the virus was first reported.

The very telling history of virus response in America is captured especially well by the documentary “When AIDS Was Funny”

A modern element of this can be found in the ugly section following the “At Harvard forum, three who know warn of ‘most daunting virus’ in half a century” story, where you will find comments like…

• “…these ‘experts’ have no real evidence that what they say is true…”
• “I support any disease that thins out the heard. Especially liberals and filthy Democrats.”
• “I am sorry but all you Democrats and socialists will rot slowly as the disease consumes you then its time for the eternal lake of fire.”

And as Sue Turner has pointed out, here’s how the UK government used its office of information in 1987 to counteract these kinds of ignorant and harmful comments.

PsyWar hosts a photo gallery with some interesting history, such as this one from WWII:

Indian troops in the Egyptian desert get a laugh from one of the leaflets which Field Marshal Erwin Rommel has taken to dropping behind the British lines now that his ground attacks have failed. The leaflet, which of course are strongly anti-British in tone, are printed in Hindustani, but are too crude to be effective. (Photo was flashed to New York from Cairo by radio. Credit: ACME Radio Photo)

The Australian War Memorial gives a sample of the crude work. Here’s a leaflet dropped by Nazis on 22nd August 1942 at El Alamein meant to unsettle Australia’s 9th Division.

The platapus boomerang is a dubious choice for leaflets meant to hurt morale as it simply reinforced the official blazon of the 9th as you can see here plainly:

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Update September 2021: Armchair Historian gives us his perspective on India in WWII

See also, headlines from Operation Bertram and Operation Torch reporting how easily and badly Rommel was routed by the British:

Rommel was impatient, hot-headed and disagreeable. His work often was beset by predictability, simple planning failures (e.g. communications and supply) and lack of accountability.

His troops ultimately were crushed by Allied forces in Summer of 1942 and, perhaps most notably, he abandoned them by 1943. A good thing too, given his personal role in spread of horrors from an unthinking devotion to fascism:

…empowered to “take executive measures against the civilian population”, Nazi jargon for robbery, murder and enslavement.

Here’s a perfect example:

“The Germans expected to seize Lyon quite easily,” Fargettas recounted. “But on the morning of June 19, they faced very strong resistance, in battles lasting for several hours. After the Wehrmacht won the first battles in the afternoon, they executed French as well as African prisoners. But on the next day – after the last pockets of resistance were defeated – they divided the prisoners into two: The French on one side, the Africans on the other. They led the latter down an isolated road. They were sent to a field and machine-gunned.” During these massacres, some French soldiers were also executed or wounded for trying to intervene.

Mass executions of POW and obvious violations of war conventions in the Chasselay Massacre was not the exception. Rommel was directly involved in an illegal execution of a French Colonel in 1940.

Hiding such obvious failures of leadership while cooking up a “famous reputation” for the Nazi General was propaganda by its military intelligence. In other words there was a concerted effort by Rommel and his peers to conceal their ongoing atrocities from the Allies. Such propaganda was spread around Europe in an attempt to hide reality and “morale boost” its troops facing an unavoidable defeat.

I mean by 1942 it was very clear that Germany had no chance to win — it became a question only of how long the Germans would continue to make terrible life choices.

An interesting footnote on how Rommel was routed so quickly by Montgomery is that the former tried to blame his failures on obedience to Hitler or at least interference, while the latter made no excuses when he refused to listen to Churchill.

A couple years after Rommel’s disasters in North Africa and Europe he followed stupid orders to kill himself, citing to his family a fear of living in a world without Nazism (and also Hitler threatened to shoot dead Rommel’s entire family unless he committed suicide immediately).

Such fealty was spun as propaganda into bogus claims that the retreating General who swallowed poison was in fact loved by Nazis.

Even more laughable was their propaganda that he died from battle wounds, a sad twist since he had walked away from battle and then Hitler killed him with a pill.

Curiously, American soldiers to this day sometimes buy into widespread propaganda and lies about the Nazi Rommel, very similar to American pathetic attempts to believe in the failure and fraud Confederate General Lee.

Even more to the point, and another interesting footnote in history, Winston Churchill in 1941 had told the Allies to name tanks with real words instead of “gibberish” designations. The M3 “General Lee” was named for one of the worst military leaders in history, assigned to the American variant, while the British chose M3 “General Grant” for their own model. The Grant was shipped from America to face Rommel and became a prominent factor in General Montgomery’s crushing defeat in the first battle of El Alamein.

British Prime Minister Churchill then pressured the U.S. to call their next tank the M4… Sherman.

Fast forward to today and here’s the view from a U.S. M2 Bradley during the Iraq War, where a Nazi portrait has been attached inside the “fighting vehicle” in a completely tone-deaf fashion.

Surprised there isn’t a picture of General Lee next to it.

Anyone stepping into that vehicle should sadly “get a laugh” at the bad propaganda, just like 1942 Indian or Australian troops in the Egyptian desert.