Posted on 10/29/2005 10:15:48 AM PDT by Clive
Dear Family and Friends,
A friend of mine recently had occasion to visit a commercial farm that had been seized by the government for re-distribution. Just five years ago every acre of the farm had been involved in intensive agricultural production. Eggs, tobacco, beef, maize and mutton had come off this land every year.
Over 50 men had been employed on this farm less than five years ago and these men, with their wives, children and extended families had lived and thrived on this property.
And now, my friend who visited this farm recently, said that what he had seen was so painful that it made his "heart sore with shame." My heart is also sore to have to relate this story as I too knew this farm, this piece of land, the owners and many of the farm workers and their families who had made such a good life and living on this land.
The boundary fences surrounding the property are mostly non existent, the wire stolen, the poles long since taken for firewood. The chicken houses have been stripped, wire mesh gone, tin roofing sheets removed and all that remains is the concrete floors - cracked, chipped and with grass crawling through in tough runners.
The farm house, my friend says, is "finished". The ceilings have gone. There is no longer electricity in the house; electrical wires and their conduits have literally been dug out of the walls, along with the wall plug sockets, light fittings and connections. Windows are just holes in walls as window frames and burglar bars have gone, chiseled out of the walls. There is no longer water in the house; the bathroom and kitchen geysers have gone, the stainless steel kitchen sinks have been removed and in the bathroom the taps have been taken.
Outside, on the land, there is little activity. Aside from a few little scratches where rape and tomatoes are being tended near the dam, there is not much else going on. Big fields are unploughed, seed does not wait stacked in the sheds, fertilizer and chemicals are not piled in workshops.
In less than two weeks Zimbabwe's rainy season will begin and tragically what my friend saw is not an isolated incident.
The Governor of the Reserve Bank is repeatedly pleading for massive increases in production on seized farms. Vice President Joseph Msika keeps on threatening to remove farmers who are not using the land they were given but hints that this is a delicate process. Barely a month ago Vice President Joyce Mujuru said :"If you are not farming properly, this is sabotage at its highest level .... We want farmers who work the land for maximum production, not incompetents and idlers who just sit and do nothing."
Zimbabwe's main growing season is right now. Little is happening. In the supermarket this week piles of seed maize sits on the shelves. People cannot afford to buy it and have no no fuel to transport it.
People talk of how new farmers are becoming multi billionaires this October - they queue for their government fuel allocation which they buy at 30,000 a litre and then sell for 100,000 a litre on the black market. You certainly can't make that much money farming so why even bother.
Until next week, love cathy.
Cathy, give it up. Leave Zim before they kill you. Complaining about how horrible everything is won't fix it. It's lost.
Yep, killing the goose that laid the golden egg.
There was a railway switchman being examined on a simulator. The examiners would fail switches and lights and set various traffic moving to simulate various emergencies.
Finally, they had set up an absolutely impossible situation with the switches frozen the lights our, the communications down and two trains barreling towards each other on a single track.
They asked the switchman what he would do and he replied "I would call my sister".
"What could your sister do?" asked the examiners.
"Nothing," replied the switchman. "but she has never seen a train wreck."
It's worth us staying informed here because it will be less than a year before we are dealing with call to help with the famine that is surely coming.
Colonization was the best thing that ever happened to Africa.
"Colonization was the best thing that ever happened to Africa."
That's a nasty thing to say.
On the other hand, prior colonization is a fact and socialism in the name of poor natives has been disasterous everywhere it's been tried - in Africa just as with South America.
If you are able to read this, and I hope you are, this community has a prayer for you. You have valiantly reported on the descending situation in Zimbabwe. Your efforts have been above and beyond the call of any duty.
Now it is time for you and your family to get out of there, and go to a place where you will be safe, and your talents will be appreciated and well used. It is time.
And all of us hope to hear from you when you are safely in another place.
Cordially,
Congressman Billybob
This is the result of communism. Ugly, isn't it? When is Sixty Minutes gonna cover this? When is NPR gonna have its reporters investigate black racism? How is the New York Times going to play this on its editorial page?
What? You mean the liberals don't cover stories that put the Left in a bad light? Then in some ways the MSM are as guilty as the thugs who did this.
I feel badly for your friend. These governments and their NGO experts never learn: redistribution absolutely kills crop yields, and doesn't do a thing for all the underlying problems that usually are the culprits against farmers making a living. Look at the Sandinistas, after they stole and redistributed the land, the output fell dramatically, and the farm-gate prices never rose because of urban price controls and lack of inputs and infrastructure to fertilize/treat, transport, and store the crops. I get sick thinking about it. Idiots.
Zimbabwe better hurry, because Bush is scheduled to go to India next year - he'll probably give away all our money there if nobody else gets in line now.
It's past time for Mugabe and other progressive elements in Zimbabwe to liquidate the Anglo-capitalist saboteurs!
Power to the people!
Marxism really works on all to steal the most from others and provide the least to others. The more loyal the individual to the ideology, the more they are allowed to steal.
Capitalism provides for those who provide for themselves. Because capitalism moves people to provide rather than steal, it results in excess goods to provide for the many.
How Marxism survives is a mystery, or is it. Watch capitalism come to the rescue and provide its wealth to the starving masses under Mugabe's despotic rule. You can count on it.
I'm curious about Cathy. What was she doing when Zimbabwe was still Rhodesia? Was she rooting for the government or the "freedom fighters"?
If she helped create the mess that is now Zimbabwe I have no sympathy for her.
What could be expected to occur on handing the reins of a Western built, civilized country over to a communist-backed domestic terrorist movement which claimed to represent the indigenous culture. Bear in mind that the indigenous culture amounted to stone aged savages whose society never progressed beyond village level thuggery.
This is a crying shame Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) was one of the most prosperous and beautiful countries in Africa. Now, it is a mere shell of what is was. To think that the free world and the useless UN has stood by and done nothing while this rape is continuing just shows what the world thinks when the injustice is against white people.
The noble savage is a liberal myth. There's nothing noble about shivering with dysentery in a stick hut while a medicine man dances away the evil spirits. There's nothing noble about mass starvation the year it doesn't rain.
Belief in the noble savage implies that being civilized - clean water, literacy, medicine, Christianity law - is by extension ignoble and something to be ashamed of.
Bringing those people the oppurtunity to live in a civilized country is nothing nasty and nothing to apologize for.
Abandoning them back to misguided savagery and starvation as was done with Rhodesia is the nastiest thing we could have possibly done, and no apology will ever make up for it.
You are far too generous. It was the MSM, the leftists, Europe and Jimmy Carter that pushed for and assisted in the creation of this situation. They were all told that this is what would happen, they all said "Oh no, you are just nasty racists who resist the advance of world socialism and black people".
Watch. The same self absorbed and willfully ignorant leftists and the MSM will now explain that this is all the fault of capitalism and colonialism.
That's a nasty thing to say.
Perhaps. But it doesn't make it any less true.
During the period of colonization things generally got better for most Africans, often much better, than they had been before.
Since the end of colonization, things have generally gotten worse for most Africans.
Those two statements are facts. Why they are true can be discussed endlessly, but it is very difficult to argue that either is not actually a fact.
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