While a U.S. war against Iraq seems increasingly certain, the United States does nothing to stop the expropriation of white farmers in Zimbabwe by the terrorist state constructed by the country's black president, Robert Mugabe.
Zimbabwe, it's true, is far removed from most vital U.S. interests, but since Washington played a major role, through sanctions against Rhodesia in the 1960s and '70s and through insistence on Rhodesia's transition to "democracy" in 1980, in creating the current disaster, Washington ought to be playing a far larger role in stopping what may yet turn into the outright genocide of whites.
In a front-page article on the Zimbabwe crisis last week, the New York Times reports that the Mugabe regime is now in the process of forcing 2,900 white farmers—what the paper calls "the country's most productive farmers"—off their land. Of course, the Times is also careful to point out that the land "was seized from blacks during the days of British colonial rule," but the point is that without the white farmers, the country today, in the happy days of democracy, will be unable to feed itself. [NYT, For Zimbabwe's White Farmers, Time to Move On, By RACHEL L. SWARNS, August 4, 2002]
The United Nations projects that some 6 million Zimbabweans, half the country's population, will face starvation. That has not deterred the Mugabe government from proceeding with encouraging mobs of blacks in attacking white farmers, throwing them off their farms, and murdering both whites and blacks who show any resistance.
Mugabe himself has repeatedly threatened to kill the whites and continues to insist they will not be compensated for the land they "stole."
Meanwhile, it's not the black population that is getting the land stolen—excuse me, liberated—from the whites. As the Times notes, "Prominent politicians loyal to Mr. Mugabe now control scores of fertile farms while many poor blacks are stranded on arid stretches without adequate water or sanitation." That, too, is among the fruits of democracy in a country utterly lacking in any history of or preparation for that particular form of government.
The Zimbabwe situation has been mounting for some years now, and while Western governments have spouted and spewed about human rights violations in China, North Korea, Indonesia and the Middle East, there has been virtual silence about Zimbabwe. Great Britain has tried to get Zimbabwe to develop a "responsible" land redistribution plan but won't support the current process, which is nothing more than grand theft. The European Union has imposed sanctions on Zimbabwe, which are not adequately enforced, while the Bush administration, the Times reports, has "criticized Zimbabwe's treatment of its farmers and diplomats ... [and is] quietly pressuring officials to reconsider their stance."
Meanwhile, the deadline for leaving their land has come and gone for Mugabe's white victims.
There is, quite frankly, not much the United States can do at this point, other than offer refuge for the white farmers expropriated. While Mr. Bush gushes over illegal aliens who broke American laws to get here, he has nothing to offer white Zimbabweans whose dispossession is largely the direct result of the diplomacy of three U.S. administrations under Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Jimmy Carter and their insistence that Rhodesian "white supremacy" be destroyed.
The current racial tyranny in Zimbabwe is immensely assisted by two unshaken assumptions in Western minds. One assumption is that black leadership in Africa cannot and should not be lambasted and subverted in the same way that white leadership was previously. Racial guilt, fear of black political backlash and sheer racial self-hatred by Western white elites feed this assumption.
The other assumption is that, because our elites really think that whites did steal the land from blacks in colonial days, the expropriation of whites today contains some justice, that the whites really don't have a clear and firm right to their land. That was the premise of the New York Times story itself, as it is of the British government wheedling for a "more just" redistribution plan.
By the same logic, of course, Americans have no rights to the land on which the World Trade Center once sat, because we snookered the Indians out of Manhattan for 24 dollars worth of beads and trinkets.
As multiculturalist ideology seeps through the minds of Western elites—conservative or leftist, Republican or Laborite—that inference too will begin to bear fruit.
What really lies behind the real-life dispossession, the coming famine and the possible genocide in Zimbabwe is not just the criminal ruthlessness of Robert Mugabe or the lack of preparation for democracy of most Zimbabweans, but the sheer degeneracy of the Western white world that insisted on pushing Rhodesia down the road it is now traveling and today is too frightened, too guilt-ridden, and too weak to insist on pulling it back.
COPYRIGHT CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
August 12, 2002
