RL: Yeah, and 1/2 of the Black population was starving. It is not like that now.
Jason Yiddish: This is in reference to Rhodesia? Interesting, sources?
It’s well known and I did a piece on it, actually.
Yeah, sure Rhodesia was a food exporter. Because all their food was going for export! How bout that?
This is not dissimilar to many Latin American countries where half the population is starving, yet they are also “food exporters” because all of the crops grown are cash crops for export on land owned by a few rich people in countries were 2% of the landowners own almost all of the land. All the rest of the people are landless peasants working for peanuts or scraping out a living on marginal land. The country does not grow enough food to feed their people. For a long time the project of the Left down there, described as Communism by the US and the US media, was actually more like, “We are trying to figure out a way to feed our people.” A pretty simple project. Apparently if you are trying to figure out a way to grow food for your people, according to the US government, you must be a Communist.
About 2% of the landowners owned almost all of the good land in Rhodesia. Coincidentally, they were all White people! Gosh, how did that happen? All of these crops were grown for cash exports. The country was not growing enough food to feed their people. All of the rural Blacks were either landless peasants working on White farms for peanuts or forced onto marginal land which they farmed inefficiently, resulting in poor yields. Incidentally, large scale farming on marginal land was causing a lot of erosion, and this was getting to be a serious problem. Much of the country was literally eroding away.
As part of the transition, the 2,000 White farmers who owned all the good land were supposed to sell their land. But the US and especially UK (because the farmers were mostly British) dragged their heels and dragged out the process endlessly. Bottom line is they were not going to sell out for any money, with the support of the US and UK.
Most of Mugabe’s supporters were war veterans. The war veterans wanted the land situation resolved. They were getting increasingly angry about the situation. Mugabe kept warning the Anglos that the situation was getting out of hand, and he would not be able to control his supporters any longer. The Anglos did nothing but continue to drag their heels.
Eventually the situation exploded and the war veterans rioted all across the land, seizing the White farms. It was not as violent as the racists make it out to be. Seven Whites were killed, but that wasn’t all of them. There were 25,000 in the country. Mostly the Whites just left.
The Blacks did not know how to run the farms, so they basically destroyed them and in a pretty moronic way to boot. When this happened, it was what Mugabe had been trying to avoid all this time, but it was his supporters doing it, and he felt he could not go against them, so he cheered it on. He also did not want the farms dismantled by them. Mugabe wanted the Whites to sell out peacefully and then continue to have large farms run more or less by the state or just break them up into small farms. The Blacks did not know how to run large farms. A large farm is a business, and it requires quite a bit of smarts to run one, which the Blacks did not have. But of course the Blacks could grow food crops on small plots! They’d been doing it for millennia! Blacks even started plantation agriculture in East Africa before Discovery.
Unfortunately this turned into a disgusting meme egged on by the corporate media called more or less, “Niggers Are So Stupid, They Can’t Even Grow Food!” Although this meme was rather humorous, obviously that’s not true because that is how they survived there for millennia. Of course all of the White nationalists on the Web continue to flog this dead horse endlessly. Did you know? Black people are so stupid that they can’t even grow food? They’re too dumb to even grow food! How dumb can you get?
You have to admit that this whole mess was pretty racist. The US and UK holding a whole country hostage because 2,000 Whites, who own all the good land, refused to sell out. The Blacks scraping away an existence on marginal land and the country eroding away as a consequence. Half of the Blacks starving and malnourished.
This is a hardcore racist foreign policy any way you cut the cake. And this was going on during the Presidency of Bill Clinton, supposedly a friend of Blacks who was jokingly regarded as the First Black President. So we are still a quite racist country in how we conduct our foreign policy, even when we have a so-called liberal Democrat president! God forbid how we act when Republicans get in. Black people better duck and cover.
For standing up to the US and UK, the two countries put the Zimbabwe under severe financial sanctions. No bank on Earth could deal with them. Of course, after a while this completely ruined the economy. Thing is, Blacks eat better now under Mugabe than they did in Rhodesia.
Mugabe has been beaten to Hell and back by the corporate media and the Anglo governments. Boy, do they hate him. You see, he stood up to us, gave us the finger, and told us to go fuck ourselves. Remember Castro did the same thing. So did the Iranians and Hezbollah.
The Empire does not tolerance insolent brats among its slave colonies. America usually declares war in some way or other against anyone who has the balls to stand up to us and tell us to fuck off. The US usually organizes guerrilla wars against these countries, tries to topple them with coups, puts them under sanctions to ruin their economies, etc. All the above entities got that treatment. We just won’t tolerate any uppity non-Whites, and we certainly do not tolerate slave rebellions in our colonies. The only appropriate way for most countries to address the US is, “Yes massa?”
Yes, Zimbabwe was screwed up for a long time, but that was 100% due to the sanctions and 0% due to anything else. They have managed to climb out of most of the mess. The farm situation is slowly being resolved. Whites have even been asked to come back to farm lands, under strict regulation of course.
A reporter recently went to the capital of Zimbabwe, Harare, and said it was nothing like how the media described it. It was clean and peaceful. Couples ate lunch in the parks on work breaks. All medical care is free, and he visited a brand new imaging center run by competent physicians. He even went to the worst slums, which were not so great. However, he said that those were probably the nicest looking slums in Africa. In other words, every other country has worse slums than Zimbabwe. Mugabe is a socialist, and the state has all sorts of social programs to help the people, and this keeps the country from collapsing to typical Sub-Saharan levels of chaos.
Mugabe has enjoyed strong support all through this mess. The people stood by him even when the place had completely fallen apart. The Opposition only has the support of 1/3 of the population at most. They are deeply in bed with the US and the UK and their project is full neoliberalism with privatization of all state functions. Zimbabweans have had a taste of Mugabe’s socialism, and they like it. They are not real keen on free market economics (in fact, they are not popular anywhere in Africa), and most African ruling parties have the words socialist, Left, progressive, popular, labor, etc. in their names. In fact, such is the case in most of the world. The US is one of the few populations that actually supports neoliberalism. Everyone else hates it.
The Opposition in Zimbabwe are also seen as Quislings, traitors and sellouts to the West. Mugabe is the man who led an anti-colonial rebellion and liberated their homeland from the colonists. Mugabe gives the people a sense of pride, whereas the Opposition seem like a bunch of sellouts. So here we see as in the Arab World and South Africa that people would rather be poor and free than wealthier and in chains.
The media turned the collapse of the Zimbabwean state then turned into “Niggers Can’t Even Run Countries!” This meme was also populated by the corporate media and both the US and UK. Like everything was going fine when Whites were running the show and growing the food, but everything quickly went to Hell when the country was turned over to Blacks because Niggers can’t run countries or grow food. You know, only White people can do that.
The whole matter is disgusting. Almost no one knows the true story, and the behavior of the US government and the corporate media has been so racist, it is sickening.
