Fall Out Boy's Pete Wentz' Uncle Is Gen. Colin Powell And Grandfather is Propagandist
Fall Out Boy's Pete Wentz' Uncle Is Gen. Colin Powell And Grandfather is Propagandist
In 2003 Gen. Colin Powell spoke at the U.N. in an effort to pursue a phony war in Iraq...That very same Year Gen. Powell's Nephew released his debut album which went Gold, entitledTAKE THIS TO YOUR GRAVE..."Take this to your grave", is that what Sadam did with the secret knowledge of WMDs??? Doubt it, probably all just a big social manipulation. You will see that the family that Pete Wentz comes from are no strangers to state sponsored culture creation using musical acts if you read the interview with Arthur Lewis, Pete's Grandfather which I included in this post.
Peter “Pete” Lewis Kingston Wentz III was born on 5 June 1979 in Wilmette, Illinois, a posh suburb of Chicago. His parents are Pete Wentz II, an attorney, and Dale (née Lewis).[*] He is best known for being the bassist, lyricist, and backing vocalist for the American Pop Punk band Fall Out Boy. Before Fall Out Boy's inception in 2001, Wentz was a fixture of the Chicago hardcore scene and was notably the lead vocalist and lyricist for Arma Angelus. Wentz attended DePaul University where he was studying Political Science. His black maternal grandfather, Arthur Winston Lewis, served as the U.S. Ambassador to Sierra Leone; Arthur Winston Lewis' cousin is General Colin Powell. Wentz' parents met while campaigning for former Vice President Joe Biden's senatorial run in the 1970s.[6][19]
Pete Wentz Sr: "Mom and I met in Washington when we were both legislative assistants to Senator Biden when he was in his first term. I had worked in his campaign and your mother had been in the Foreign Service. We started out as friends and the rest is history." [*]
Pete Wentz: "That picture is me, Joe Biden and my mom" "Wow, I'm like the same height still."[*Pic here]
Colin Luther Powell is an American statesman and a retired four-star general in the United States Army.[2] Powell was born in Harlem as the son of Jamaican immigrants. During his military career, Powell also served as National Security Advisor (1987–1989), as Commander of the U.S. Army Forces Command (1989) and as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (1989–1993), holding the latter position during the Persian Gulf War. Powell was the first, and so far the only, African American to serve on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He was the 65th United States Secretary of State, serving under U.S. President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2005, the first African American to serve in that position.
(Question from Vice) Q: I saw online that you were related to Colin Powell. Is that true?
Pete Wentz: Yeah, he’s my great uncle. I met him around Desert Storm, and at the age, I was at there was a bunch of great propaganda done for it, where there were, like, trading cards and T-shirts and shit, and you were convinced that was cool. I remember asking him, “Oh man! Are you going to be using bazookas?” I can’t even imagine, like, wow. What a goofy thing to ask. I think in some way, I'm related to Malcolm Gladwell as well. I’m not sure it’s as direct, but my mom told me that the other day. I was reading a Gladwell book, and my mom was like, “Oh yeah, you’re related to him.”[*]
Pete Wentz: Ashlee and I went to the White House Correspondents' Dinner, and we had a lot of fun. Not many people know that I am distantly related to Colin Powell. I mean, it is a pretty far relation cousins of cousins of cousins but when we saw him at the dinner, he came over and said, "Hey, cousin."[*]
Pete's Grandparents
Pete’s maternal grandparents are Arthur Winston Lewis (the son of Arthur Shirley Lewis and Marion Coote) and Dolores Laura Kirlew (the daughter of Harold Aubrey Kirlew and Laura Shields). Pete’s grandfather Arthur served as the U.S. Ambassador to Sierra Leone (from 1983 to 1986). Pete’s maternal grandparents were both born in New York, and all of Pete’s maternal great-grandparents were black Jamaican immigrants. Pete’s grandfather Arthur is a cousin of General Colin Powell(likely through his “Coote” line).[*]
(Image found here)
Arthur W. Lewis was a career foreign officer who served in diplomatic missions in Eastern Europe and Africa before retiring in 1987. He also played a significant role in expanding opportunities for racial and ethnic minorities in the American diplomatic corps.
Before entering the Foreign Service, Lewis spent 23 years in the U.S. Navy. A student at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, Lewis enlisted in the Navy in 1943 and served until 1966. He returned to Dartmouth to work with the N.R.O.T.C. and teach Naval Science while still on active duty. He completed a Bachelor’s and a Master’s in Government while at Dartmouth in 1966.
In 1966, Lewis joined the United States Information Agency (USIA), a Cold War-era diplomatic agency intended to promote American culture abroad. Lewis chose to work with the USIA because he believed he would have more direct engagement with foreign nationals than in the State Department. With the support of the Ford Foundation, Lewis in 1967 created an expanded minority recruitment program for the USIA, targeting African American, Latino, and Native Americans enrolled in universities around the nation. The program brought students to Washington, D.C. for expanded training in history, language, and international affairs as preparation for successfully completing the Foreign Services entrance exam.
Lewis began his own foreign service in 1969 when he was assigned by USIA to the U.S. Embassy in Bucharest, Romania. While there he promoted American music as a forum for engaging the Romanian people in western culture. When the American jazz-rock band Blood Sweat & Tears visited Romania in 1970, Romanian officials sought to shut down a performance. Lewis successfully negotiated with the band and communist officials to allow the concert tour to continue.
Lewis’s primary foreign policy interest lay in Africa. From 1972 to 1974 Lewis served as cultural affairs officer at the U.S. Embassy in Lusaka, Zambia. In 1974 he was sent to Ethiopia which would soon be engulfed in a civil war. Expanding violence between military leaders and rebel forces meant that Lewis could not effectively organize cultural programs but instead focused on promoting western engagement and providing aid when possible.
In 1977, Lewis was sent to Lagos, Nigeria where he continued his work for the USIA until being appointed as the agency’s Director of African Affairs in 1979. In 1983, President Ronald Reagan nominated Arthur Lewis as U.S. Ambassador to Sierra Leone. He served at the Embassy in Freetown until his retirement in 1986.
Arthur Lewis continued to promote international political and economic development in Africa after his retirement from diplomatic service. He has been a senior consultant for the Nord Resources Corporation which operated mining interests in Sierra Leone from 1983 to 1995. His wife, Frances Lewis, was a historian of Africa who accompanied him on many of his missions, teaching local university students and encouraging American engagement with African culture. He is also a cousin of Colin Powell, the first African American Secretary of State.[*]
Q: What training or preparation did you receive as you entered the Service? How well did you feel you were served by the introductory program?
LEWIS: In essence, there was no real training with respect to my entry into USIA. I served for a year as a recruiter. I wrote a proposal to the Ford Foundation for a very special kind of minority recruitment program. The Foundation, for the first time ever to my knowledge, joined with public service institution to give a two million dollar grant to USIA to encourage and to bring into the Foreign Service minority candidates through the "front door" rather than the "back".
The program consisted of my seeking out bright young minority students who were graduating from undergraduate institutions. Then, we would bring them to Washington and enroll them in a very special two-year course of training at George Washington University. They would take courses in various histories and social sciences to bring them to speed. They would take the regular Foreign Service entrance examination at the end of their first year and again at the end of their second year. This was based on the assumption that they would not pass after the first year.
This program worked out very well. Of the twenty students with whom I was involved-- ten the first year and the ten I chose for the second year--eleven remain in the Foreign Service today. Of those eleven, eight or nine are in the senior Foreign Service. Q: Where did you seek these minority students?
Q: Where did you seek these minority students?
LEWIS: I went to large public and private Universities. I went to Emery, for example, which was graduating its first two black students. I went to Tulane which was also graduating its first two black students. I got one from Emery and two from Tulane. I got some students from Berkeley, some from historically black institutions. We took ten students the first year of whom five were black, four were Hispanic-American and one was Native American. In order to find them, I went to schools from Puerto Rico to Hawaii. We got ten students the first year of whom eight made through that year. The other two discovered that they were unsuited.
Q: Let's talk about your first overseas assignment. You were the Cultural Affairs Officer in Bucharest from 1969-72. What were your responsibilities?
LEWIS: Interestingly enough, I arrived in Bucharest with probably a two-plus in Romanian speaking and understanding. My predecessor had to leave in a hurry. I became eventually in charge of the educational exchange program--the Fulbright program. Subsequently, I discovered that a lot of students were really jazz lovers. So I made a great effort to bring American jazz musicians to Romania. Over the three years, we developed a regular routine of bringing jazz musicians through Western Europe and then Eastern Europe, including Romania.
Romania was in an expansive state at that time. It was opening to the West and looking for opportunities to trade more with the West. The Romanians wanted to get away from the "the granary of Eastern Europe" image which they had in the past. The idea of American jazz was accepted by the authorities, even if they didn't really like it. In Eastern Europe, when you deal with cultural attractions, you must deal through State institutions. I spent a lot of time working with these institutions, bringing various cultural attractions, not only jazz, but for example also American plays and other cultural attractions. These gave a different view of the United States from that acquired by a lot of young Romanians. I spent a lot of time working with University students' clubs. That was possible only because the Romanians wanted to change their orientation.
Q: That is very interesting because today the Romanians are the hard liners. But in the late '60s and early 70s, Romania was the hope of Eastern Europe and was going in the direction that Yugoslavia took. How did you deal with the local authorities all of whom must have been members of the Communist Party? Were they cooperating under duress or did they seem interested in your programs?
LEWIS: Romania was occupied by the Soviets until 1962. It was under the rule of , who himself was a Stalinist figure. It was 1965 when he died and Ceausescu came to power. It was believed that Ceausescu, supposedly the great liberator, was the great "opener" to the West. Indeed he was, from an economic point of view, but from the social and cultural point, Romania with the strangest kind of openness in its international affairs, was still one of the most domestically repressive Eastern European nations. I didn't think that has ever changed. This fact has become now much more noticeable and much better known. Even in those days, Romania was internally a repressive state. We were probably viewing it with hope rather than realistically. Even though we have had an adversarial relationship with the Soviet Union and the Soviet block, we have always harbored hope of eventual change. That hope has flourished at times; at other times, it has withered. We are a society that strongly believes in change and the inevitability of change. We accept change. For us, therefore, it is normal assumption as we enter into diplomatic relationships with other States.
Q: Did you believe that the cultural program was an assist to that process of change?
LEWIS: Yes, because, even though the Romanians knew and understood the power of culture and what it can do, they were still willing to allow a certain amount of cultural exchange. I have seen certain cultural attractions taking place in Romania and frightening the authorities. I remember a group called "Blood, Sweat and Tears" which almost caused a riot. They were almost thrown out of the country along with me. The group didn't want to continue its performances in Romania because of its repressiveness, as illustrated by what the authorities did to the young people who wanted to hear them.
First of all, the group was on the cutting edge of the 60s' modern musical groups. They sang of a kind of freedom that young people saw and felt strongly in the West and particularly the United States. Their music reflected the very vital dynamism on a United States that was going through a profound change. The young people of Easter Europe had heard some of this music on the "Voice of America". English is the preferred language in Eastern Europe because it is the language of science and technology. At that point, no one yet understood that it was also the language of finance and economics. It was a language that many young people understood and responded to in Eastern Europe. While I don't remember the name of particular songs, they were extremely popular and the young Romanians wanted to hear them. I do remember that in the concerts, the young people got so vociferous in the audience that the authorities stepped on the stage and tried to stop the performance. The musical group refused; then the authorities turned off the electricity so that there was no sound. They nevertheless continued to play and the audience of 15- 20,000 arose and began to break up the chairs and lit fires. I was right there wondering what I had wrought.
Interestingly enough, this episode resulted in a Romanian decision that they didn't want the group anymore. The group decided that it would not perform any longer in Romania. We came to a stand-off. I had a meeting with the group in which it became clear that my 42-year old perception was not too much different than their views which were those of 20 or 21 year olds. I was young at heart. I was able to talk to them and got them to agree to continue the tour if the Romanian government would not interfere. I finally talked to the governmental institution I had to deal with and got it to agree to lower everyone's temperature and permit the tour to continue. If they hadn't allowed the tour to continue, it would have complicated relationships between Romania and the United States. The group had after all come at the invitation the Romanian government. The tensions were calmed and the tour was completed. The group then went to Warsaw and became someone else's problem.
Q: What instruction were you getting from Washington?
LEWIS: "Don't let this get out of hand. It is your problem, but don't let it get out of hand". Ambassador Leonard Meeker was involved in a peripheral way, but I think he was perceived by the group as an old fuddy-duddy. He let me handle it and take care of it. Eventually, we were able to put the pieces back together.
Q: This is what diplomacy is all about: tensions between sovereign states created by a young rock group and Communist authorities.
LEWIS: You never think of it in that fashion. Even putting the pieces back together within the American community representing different generations was difficult.
Q: Did you have many touring play groups and did have to be careful about which plays were presented? Or other cultural events?
LEWIS: Yes. We had a couple of Thornton Wilder plays which were better received because they were held under University auspices and the people who attended were mostly University students majoring in English or literature. They didn't have the emotional content and velocity of musical groups. Somehow music is a most powerful instrument. That is one lesson I learned.[*]
Frances A. "Fay" Lewis, an expert in the field of African studies who worked for many years as a program officer at Meridian International Center in Washington, died Sept. 25 at her home in the District of complications from a brain tumor. She was 67.
Dr. Lewis worked to bring young Africans to the United States for educational programs through the State Department's International Visitor Leadership Program.
She retired from Meridian last spring after 22 years of service.
Frances Anne Leary was born in Washington and grew up in Arlington, Mass. She graduated in 1963 from Smith College in Northampton, Mass., and received a master's degree and doctorate in African history from Northwestern University.
Dr. Lewis taught African and Mideast history at Northwestern and Temple universities. She also was a lecturer at Georgetown University and the Department of State's Foreign Service Institute.
She served from 1977 to 1981 as chair of the Association of African Studies Programs and later helped coordinate the U.S. Fulbright Program in Africa as an employee of the U.S. Information Agency.
Soon after she married Arthur W. Lewis in 1983, her husband was appointed U.S. ambassador to Sierra Leone by President Ronald Reagan. The couple moved to Freetown, where they lived for three years.
In addition to her husband, of Washington, survivors include a stepdaughter, Dale Wentz of Chicago; three brothers; a sister; three grandchildren, including rock musician Pete Wentz; and a great-grandson.[*]
Wentz And UNICEF
The United Nations humanitarian organization UNICEF selected Wentz to be the national Ambassador for the 2010 UNICEF Tap Project. The UNICEF Tap Project takes place during World Water Week (March 21-27) and raises money for clean water for children around the world.[*]
U.S. Fund for Pakistani flood relief: Pete Wentz calls for more help for children affected by floods in Pakistan.
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