Robert Mugabe (left) is a complex character. Once an intensely popular rebel leader and president, the man who's ruled Zimbabwe for over twenty years now looks doomed. What's caused this spectacular fall from grace is difficult to say. Is the man yet another victim of masculine hubris? Is he deluded into thinking he's on some kind of divine mission? Or is he just a desperate politician who's been making his last desperate stand for the past five years.
If you're looking for someone/thing to blame for the ongoing tragedy that is Zimbabwe, then look no further, as STEPHEN GLOVER and his jackbooted colleagues have the answer.
It's the “British Left” Stupid!
Steve gets straight to work this week claiming “Mr Mugabe had his fans on the Left of British politics even when his gallant 'freedom fighters' were raping nuns and killing civilians in the 'liberation war' of the 1970s.” It seems strange to me that when 280,000 white people subjugate six million black people there really isn't any need to put the phrase liberation in inverted comas, but then again you just can't tell those sub-editors at The Mail. And let's not forget the old raping nuns cliché. A timeless classic used to fire up the righteous indignation of the religious, gullible and slightly xenophobic since the dawn of time. Napoleon's regiments supposedly raped Spanish nuns during the Peninsular wars of 1804. The Zulus apparently raped nuns during British attempts to wipe them out in 1879. And obviously the vile Hun raped nuns in France and Belgium during the First World War.
There's never been any need to provide a shred of evidence for the charge of Nun rape, and naturally Steve doesn't. All you do need to do is conjure up an image of a slightly ruffled habit and then relax and watch the army recruitment offices fill.
Throughout Steve's article he portrays Rhodesia as a magical-happy land where the rains never failed and the rivers ran with lemonade. He even calls it “Africa's breadbasket”, just like every other lazy hack who can't be arsed to think up a nickname for themselves. He shows white settlers as a lovely bunch, always helping their black brothers and sisters and quite partial to breaking into songs from hit musicals.
In actual fact, when Zimbabwe was Rhodesia, the government of Ian Smith (right) - butcher's son and uber-racist – refused bi-lateral independence from Britain because it meant they'd have to give all black citizens the vote. Steve also manages to gloss over the laws that set aside 50 per cent of cultivatable land for the whites, who never made up more than six per cent of the population. During the Liberation War during almost every male in white Rhodesia had done a tour of duty within the previous two yeas and anti-communist, anti-equality mercenaries poured in from the USA, South Africa and Portugal to name a few places. Anyone thought to be supporting the rebels was brutally repressed, with villages being burned to teach co-operators a lesson (that one worked a treat in Vietnam) and police firing into massed demonstrations.
You can argue that the liberation fighters, some under Mugabe's command and some not, committed atrocities of their own. It's pretty much indisputable but it's not the point. The left support liberation struggles, especially those on grounds of race, not because they're of unimpeachable integrity but because they're inevitable. Ian Smith's government could have killed three times as many people as it did, ten times even, but it would never have won. The black people of Zimbabwe wanted land, freedom and equality, and the intensity of a struggle for something this virtuous can never be matched by the desire to prop-up the ancient and crumbling edifice of privilege. And that makes it more of a shame to see Mugabe's Zanu-PF party become what it fought so hard to destroy - a powerful elite prepared to use any measures possible, including violence, to cling to its last shred of power . But it also shows Morgan Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) will eventually triumph and the people of Zimbabwe will have the kind of country they want, because they're prepared to risk their lives to get it.
It is Mugabe's insatiable love of power and pathological fear of losing that's brought Zimbabwe to the terrible juncture it now faces, not a bunch of white, middle-class lefties in Britain supporting a people's right to freedom and self-determination.
Bloody Steve...
Also This Week...
...Amanda Platell socks it to Ken Livingstone for daring to try and repopulate the planet outside the strict laws laid down by our Australia God...
...Quentin Letts uses words like "glug" to try and hide the fact he's fresh out of ideas...
... Keith Waterhouse gets his medication mixed up and starts going on about the Blue Peter time capsule...
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