(Under the Guise of Religion) ..United Methodists Working for Peace in Zimbabwe

Letter from Zimbabwe: Sick at heart[Excerpts] The Amani Trust, which exists to help torture victims, defines trauma as torture, severe beating or being forced to watch your family members suffering similarly or being raped/killed. On that definition 30 percent of all Shona over the age of 30 have suffered trauma, and among the minority Ndebele the figure rises to 50 percent. So it's not surprising that the general strike, which began Wednesday, has seemd thinly supported. And when the president's youth militia goes on the rampage in the middle of town, people scatter and run even though those who voted against Mugabe must outnumber their opposites by 10 to one or more in any street situation.

……….. It is all unbearably sad. Despite its run-down center and its endlessly potholed roads Harare is a beautiful city: tall trees, wonderful vegetation, large gardens. Walking in the center one is endlessly accosted by curio sellers who have hardly seen a tourist in months. When you tell them you don't want to buy their wares they switch immediately to telling you how many hungry children they have. In part this terrible sadness stems from the fact that so many believed -- briefly -- that Mugabe might be beaten. But this disappointment and anti-climax is greatly added to by a conviction that only external forces will be effective in getting Mugabe out... and that the rest of the world doesn't seem to care.

"The news that the Commonwealth has suspended Zimbabwe is good," one Movement for Democratic Change (opposition) supporter told me, "but we need real help now, not gestures. The President is a torturer and murderer and his supporters are taking revenge all round the country on those who voted against him. Even people like me, who have fought with all I've got against him have now to think of my wife and kids. Should we run? If so where to? Surely it would be easier and cheaper for the world to help now than have to pick this country up from the dead later on?" [End Excerpts]

Why does Our Beloved FRaternal Republic permit its life's energy to be squandered by -- say -- a Neo-Axis NATO Alliance to attack Christian Serbia on the pretense of saving a few colonizing european muslims -- and turn its compassion and its caring away FRom such mass-murdering Hell holes -- including [Cambodia] of its own making -- as Mao's and Pol Pot's and Rawanda's, Liberia's, Burundi's and Rhodesia's?

Don't we love the black and brown Peoples, too?

Hillary Clinton and the Radical Left [Excerpt] It is this same idea that is found in the Social Gospel which impressed the youthful Hillary Clinton at the United Methodist Church in Park Ridge, Illinois. She later encountered the same idea in the New Left at Yale and in the Venceremos Brigade in Communist Cuba, and in the writings of the New Leftist who introduced her to the "politics of meaning" even after she had become America's First Lady. It is the idea that drives her comrades in the Children's Defense Fund, the National Organization for Women, the Al Sharpton House of Justice and the other progressive causes which for that reason still look to her as a political leader.

For these self-appointed social redeemers, the goal-"social justice"-is not about rectifying particular injustices, which would be practical and modest, and therefore conservative. Their crusade is about rectifying injustice in the very order of things. "Social Justice" for them is about a world reborn, a world in which prejudice and violence are absent, in which everyone is equal and equally advantaged and without fundamentally conflicting desires. It is a world that could only come into being through a re-structuring of human nature and of society itself.

Even though they are too prudent and self-protective to name this future anymore, the post-Communist left still passionately believes it possible. But it is a world that has never existed and never will. Moreover, as the gulags and graveyards of the last century attest, to attempt the impossible is to invite the catastrophic in the world we know. [End Excerpt]

*****The same disease has even affected the churches, where some of them have become conduits to perpetuate ZANU PF's message of oppression. Some church leaders have deserted the pulpit and can be seen gracing ZANU PF occasions. They have become the voices of oppression and, to make it worse, they are using God's name in vain. Such church leaders cannot even condemn state-sponsored brutality against its own citizens because they are now dining and wining with the ruling elite.
It is high time that Christians and congregations chase away pastors, reverends and priests who bless and speak well of the state-sponsored evil being encouraged by Zimbabwe's ruling class. Men of God who grace ZANU PF occasions for their own selfish ends should be chased away from the churches.

These are indeed abnormal times when so-called men of God turn out to be supporters of such devilish acts as being perpetrated by the state today. It is time that right-thinking Zimbabwean Christians say "to hell with these fake men of God who preach the word according to ZANU PF".***

(Under the Guise of Religion) ..United Methodists Working for Peace in Zimbabwe

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.