Amerika

by Dr. Henry Lydo

In 1957 the Rhodesian African Nationalist Movement began and was shortly thereafter banned by the White colonial government in February, 1959. By 1961, the organizing black citizens launched a campaign of violence against White communities. This violence was encouraged by the citizen leadership, which saw it as necessary to quash British colonialism. One chief organizer of this citizen ensemble was none other than Social-Communist, Robert Mugabe, who was imprisoned for the next eleven years, not seeing freedom again until the year 1974. While he was imprisoned, he assisted in organizing the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army, or the ZANLA.

The ZANLA spread to neighboring Mozambique, and a number of surrounding national areas. With Mugabe’s encouragement in 1976, 1,000 ZANLA guerillas moved across the border into Rhodesia (later Zimbabwe) assaulting White-owned farms and stores. These attacks forced White farmers and business people to abandon their farms, many exiting the country for good. Unemployed Blacks joined the ZANLA by the thousands, with each individual seeking their own piece of the promised land redistribution.

In the course of the war, some 30,000 people died, with the Whites suffering most of the casualties by the later third of the decade, although Mugabe never achieved a single military victory over the colonial army of Rhodesia. When asked by world leadership what he was attempting to create, Mugabe stated that what he emphatically desired most of all, was a one-party Marxist state. Mugabe’s public words were: “Let us hammer [the White man] to defeat. Let us blow up his citadel. Let us give him no time to rest. Let us chase him in every corner. Let us rid our home of this settler vermin.”

The British government organized the Lancaster House Agreements, at Lancaster House in London, which officially changed the name from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe in 1980. Mugabe was warned by British leaders not to alienate the White minority, since a mass exit would devastate the national economy, as it already had in Mozambique. Whites were terrified over the fact that Mugabe’s patrimonial population made up seventy percent of the national population, the fact that he was an avowed Marxist, and the fact of his own stated intent to exterminate the White population of Zimbabwe.

When Mugabe returned to Zimbabwe, he settled into a house in Mount Pleasant, a wealthy white suburb in the northern part of Harare, Zimbabwe. When Mugabe moved into the Rhodesian Premier’s residence in Salisbury, Zimbabwe, after being elected Prime Minister in 1980, he left the furnishings just as they were when the Rhodesian Premier, Ian Smith, held office. Across the country, Statues of Cecil Rhodes were removed, and squares and roads named after prominent colonial figures were renamed after Black nationalists. Mugabe employed North Korean architects to construct a monument, known as the National Heroes Acre, to commemorate the black majority’s struggle against the white minority. The United States Provided a twenty-three million dollar three year aid package. The British provided financing for land reform programs.

What was wrong with the social-communist state being allowed to support itself? Why were these communists compelled to extract their support and sustenance from capitalist elements within the nation of Zimbabwe, and without? When these elements pulled out and away, how were the Communists ever going to become self-supporting?

Mugabe made regular pronouncements regarding his creation of a new socialist society. He made a gradual transition away from capitalism, as he strengthened existing state institutions. The unemployment rate reached twenty-six percent in 1990. In the US, during the Great Depression, the nationwide unemployment figure never topped that. The national budget deficit ran year to year on a ten percent intake of the nation’s gross national product. Where was the profit derived from the remaining 90 percent of the GNP going?

The new national leadership viewed themselves as elites, purchasing large homes and expensive cars, sending their children into private schools; and acquiring farms and business with a new ardor, obviously from their confiscations. All of this elitist excess was occurring while a massive majority of Zimbabwe’s population lived in destitution and poverty. The newspapers all across the nation were purchased from a South African company who owned them, where the white editors were deposed, and replaced with government appointees. Mugabe now could control any outgoing information regarding his government and nation.

One of Mugabe’s greatest desires was to resettle 18,000 Black families on 2.5 million acres of white-owned farmland. This resettlement would cost 60 million US dollars, half of which would be paid for by the UK government. During the early years of Mugabe’s government, as the war ended, an economic boom followed. The White minority, who controlled considerable property and dominated commerce, industry, and banking, greatly benefited, with an overwhelming majority recouping their financial losses incurred during the war against colonial influence. Nevertheless, because of Mugabe’s actions and continuing threats, in 1980, one tenth of the White population of Zimbabwe sold their holdings and immigrated into South Africa. As time moved onward, larger numbers would eventually immigrate to Australia and New Zealand.

During the early 1980s, the nation of Zimbabwe descended into a period of social unrest and violence worse than that experienced during the Rhodesian Bush War. Genocide Watch claimed that more than 20,000 Black citizens perished during this period.

While promising peace and racial reconciliation in public, in secret Mugabe’s agents continued to persecute the White minority of Zimbabwe, murdering some, arresting many on false charges, torturing others, generating a worldwide outcry in protest. By the end of Mugabe’s third year as Prime Minister, one half of all Whites in Zimbabwe had sold out, hastily exiting the nation. In the 1985 election, Ian Smith won fifteen out of the twenty seats allocated for whites in Zimbabwe.

By 1990, 52,000 thousand Blacks had been settled on 6.5 million acres of land. Still, this resettlement was not enough to expunge the nation’s problem of overcrowding, being exacerbated by the reproduction rate of the Black population in spite of their destitution, incessant violence, disease rates, and squalid living conditions. The broad government intention was to eventually resettle 110,000 Black families on thirteen million acres, which would have required that half of all White-owned land be confiscated.

Over the following years, acres of white owned land in the hundreds of thousands were confiscated. Instead of land being given to landless black families, much of it was leased over to national ministers and various senior officials. As a response, in 1994 the British government, who had financed this massive theft at 44 million pounds, or 88 million US dollars, ceased its funding.

By 1998, the unemployment rate in Zimbabwe was a whopping 50 percent. By 2009, most of the skilled labor force had left the country. Ex-veterans of the anti-colonialist revolution demanded a pension. Mugabe put together a package that cost the nation 4.2 billion dollars. In February 2000, armed gangs again returned to what white-owned farms remained. These gangs had been paid to invade and attack by Mugabe’s social-communist government. By 2006, it was reported that sixty white farmers had been murdered, yet some accounts claim that many more innocents were slaughtered. Large numbers of the seized farms remained empty. Most of the land claimed by the black families remained unproductive, primarily due to a lack of farming skills and access to equipment — something obviously not anticipated by the thieving revolutionaries.

In 2000, the corn production of Zimbabwe’s land was over two million tons. In only eight years that production rate had declined to a mere 450,000 tons. The revolutionaries were cutting their own throats when they attacked the innocent white landowners. By 2005, Zimbabwe’s GDP was only equal to 3.4 billion US dollars, a mere half of what it was in 2000. By 2009 seventy-five percent of Zimbabwe’s citizen base was subsisting on international aid. What good did owning land do? By 2007, Zimbabwe had the highest inflation rate in the world, a jaw-dropping 7,600 percent! By 2008, inflation had exceeded 100,000 percent.

By 2005, eighty percent of Zimbabwe’s population was unemployed. By 2008, only twenty percent of Zimbabwe’s children were in a school of any type. Vast mismanagement of the sewage and water system led to a massive cholera outbreak the same year, with over 98,000 cases reported.

Epidemiologically, the outbreak can be explained by the breakdown and cross-contamination of the city’s water and sanitation systems. Such a reading, however, belies the complex interaction of political, economic, and historical factors that initially gave rise to the dysfunction of the water systems, that delineate the socio-spatial pattern of the outbreak, and that account for the fragmented and inadequate response of the national health system. Cholera was thus not only a social crisis; it also signaled a new dimension to Zimbabwe’s deepening political and economic crisis in 2008, which brought into question the capacity of the state and the legitimacy of the ruling party to govern.

Fifteen percent of all individuals aged 15-49 were said to have HIV. The tourism industry, which had once flourished, had now collapsed. Due to a lack of funding, Mugabe ordered the slaughter of more than a hundred elephants to provide meat for an April 2007 national feast held in his honor, contributing to the growing extinction rate of these animals. In 2005, Mugabe ordered the bulldozing of all huge squalor slums, leaving 700,000 blacks homeless. Eventually, Mugabe made an appeal directed toward these white farmers, for them to consider returning to the nation of Zimbabwe; but understandably, the farmers refused, being comfortable in their new homes. In 2016, nationwide protests raged over the continuing grind of severe economic collapse.

As we read these absolute facts, do we observe any correlations? Are there any resemblances to present day manifestations on the ground in Western nations at large, the United States or the Southern United States specifically? Where does the appeal of Social-Communism come into play? Why is it that economic deterioration virtually always correlates with a concerted attack on the Caucasian/capitalist economic structure? What if the white farmers had their land under mortgage, how might a massive loan default have played out for the economic health of Zimbabwe? What must occur to avert a similar situation in Western nations at large today? When Western governments persecute their own native populations, then how is that demographic expected to respond in lieu of any looming threat to its own survival? Why would it ever be expected to respond in any way other than one bent on survival at all costs? If persecution ever was unacceptable, then why is it now politically acceptable for western governments to persecute the White race? One of the most igniting and provocative questions may be to ask; who or what group is motivating this overt persecution in the West?

Readers should observe the facts, notice developments on the ground, then arrive at their own conclusions in regard to these questions, and many more. Allow hard facts to speak for themselves, and the truth in their voice can never be denied. When large congregations within persecuted demographics can finally muster the fortitude to merge, effectively answer questions such as those above by observing hard facts; then key causes of persisting problems may be identified, and appropriate effective solutions to these problems devised. In the end, debate on any level only leads to knowledge of an intentionally veiled truth, yet even an absolute credibility deduced in absence of direct action determined and strategically taken to resolve ever threatening negative issues, is completely worthless.

Tags: black nationalism, diversity, marxism, rhodesia, robert mugabe, zimbabwe