Posted on 04/05/2002 4:14:40 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
The perils of designer tribalism- [Excerpt] Part of what makes The Tears of the White Man such an important book is Bruckner's sensitivity to the aerodynamics of liberal guilt. He understands what launches it, what keeps it aloft, and how we might lure it safely back to earth. He understands that the entire phenomenon of Third Worldism is fueled by the moral ecstasy of overbred guilt. Bruckner is an articulate anatomist of such guilt and its attendant deceptions and mystifications. "An overblown conscience," he points out, "is an empty conscience."
-- Compassion ceases if there is nothing but compassion, and revulsion turns to insensitivity. Our "soft pity," as Stefan Zweig calls it, is stimulated, because guilt is a convenient substitute for action where action is impossible. Without the power to do anything, sensitivity becomes our main aim, the aim is not so much to do anything, as to be judged. Salvation lies in the verdict that declares us to be wrong.
The universalization-which is to say the utter trivialization-of compassion is one side of Third Worldism. Another side is the inversion of traditional moral and intellectual values. Europe once sought to bring enlightenment-literacy, civil society, modern technology-to benighted parts of the world. It did so in the name of progress and civilization. The ethic of Third Worldism dictates that yesterday's enlightenment be rebaptized as today's imperialistic oppression. For the committed Third Worldist, Bruckner points out,
-- salvation consists not only in a futile exchange of influences, but in the recognition of the superiority of foreign thought, in the study of their doctrines, and in conversion to their dogma. We must take on our former slaves as our models. . . . It is the duty and in the interest of the West to be made prisoner by its own barbarians.
Whatever the current object of adulation- the wisdom of the East, tribal Africa, Aboriginal Australia, pre-Columbian America -the message is the same: the absolute superiority of Otherness. The Third Worldist looks to the orient, to the tribal, to the primitive not for what they really are but for their evocative distance from the reality of modern European society and values.
It is all part of what Bruckner calls "the enchanting music of departure." Its siren call is seductive but also supremely mendacious. Indeed, the messy reality of the primitive world-its squalor and poverty, its penchant for cannibalism, slavery, gratuitous cruelty, and superstition-are carefully edited out of the picture. In their place we find a species of Rousseauvian sentimentality. Rousseau is the patron saint of Third Worldism. "Ignoring the real human race entirely," Rousseau wrote in a passage Bruckner quotes from the Confessions, "I imagined perfect beings, with heavenly virtue and beauty, so sure in their friendship, so tender and faithful, that I could never find anyone like them in the real world." The beings with whom Rousseau populated his fantasy life are exported to exotic lands by the Third Worldist. As Rousseau discovered, the unreality of the scenario, far from being an impediment to moral smugness, was an invaluable asset. Reality, after all, has a way of impinging upon fantasy, clipping its wings, limiting its exuberance. So much the worse, then, for reality. As Bruckner notes, in this romance adepts "were not looking for a real world but the negation of their own. . . . An eternal vision is projected on these nations that has nothing to do with their real history." [End Excerpt]
Uhhh. There wasn't any at the time. The wealth was created by the invaders, admittedly using the labor and land of the original inhabitants. But had the invasion never occurred, there would stil be no wealth there.
This contribution was made in flat contravention of a law just enacted by Mugabe forbidding foreign donations to Zimbabwean political parties, a law which is being used to hound the opposition Movement for Democratic Change and prevent it from gaining support abroad for its challenge to Mugabe in the coming presidential election. Gadaafi, who has never tolerated an opposition party, is unlikely to have been bothered by this contradiction. However, the Sunday Times has learnt, Gadaafi's aid went some way beyond this. The purchase of Gracelands was in itself a financial coup for Mugabe. He was built the house for his wife Grace withe Z$6 million he stole from the Pay-For-Your-House scheme set up to provide low cost housing for junior civil servants. Harare's courageous independent press discovered the scam. Most junior civil servants have received no benefit from the contributions they were forced to make to the scheme, and Grace, embarrassed by the scandal, never used the house after it was finished in 1997. Thereafter the house was repeatedly offered at sale for Z$25 million, but Mugabe could find no takers until Gadaafi handsomely paid him Z$35 million for it.
More sinister is the fact that Gadaafi insisted on calling into conclave Harare's small community of Indian Muslims, telling them that they must assist Mugabe's plans by declaring a jihad (holy war) to throw the whites out. If they did not do this, he told the Muslim elders, he would bring in strong arm men from the Pagad movement in Cape Town with which he had close links. There has long been speculation that Gadaafi might have links to Pagad, an extremist Muslim vigilante movement often linked to bombings and murders in the Cape, including bomb attacks on US-linked enterprises such as the Planet Hollywood restaurant on the Cape waterfront, but this is the first open confirmation of the fact. The bulk of Harare's Muslim community, consisting largely of merchants and professionals, was aghast at this demand and has failed to declare a jihad ,a failure which they believe lies behind the sudden spate of attacks on Muslim shops by Zanu-PF youths in the last ten days.
For heaven's sake, said one Muslim merchant, we all do business with whites all the time. We rely on them and most of us are appalled by what Mugabe's doing. It's obvious that those youths who were sent to attack white and Muslim shops were meant to be punishing us for not complying. However, Gadaafi - like Mugabe a virtual paranoiac in matters of personal security - had also left behind two extra bodyguards for Mugabe and four specialist coordinators. These men are believed to have experience in the training and handling of death squads and they have, in the last month, bought up 20 houses right around Zimbabwe to act as safe houses for the squads. The houses are strategically scattered only four are in Harare and there is one in every regional town or centre of any size. [End Excerpt]
Bump!
Maybe Barbra Streisand and Whoopie G. will send a few dimes.
To do so, Ms Slaughter has to ignore or excuse the thuggery, murder and mayhem occurring today in Zimbabwe, and she uses the excesses and offences of the past so to do.
Today, teenage girls are being raped in Zimbabwe by Zanu PF and "war veteran" thugs.
Today men, women and children are being beaten and tortured for the crime of supporting an opposition party in Zimbabwe.
Today people are going hungry in Zimbabwe, a nation that was once the breadbasket of southern Africa.
Today, food is being used as a weapon of opression in Zimbabwe.
Today, people are being murdered in Zimbabwe
Today, people are disappearing in Zimbabwe.
Today, 200,000 blacks, the people for whom Ms Slaughter's heart bleeds, are displaced within Zimbabwe.
And who is doing all this? Neo-colonialists? White farmers? City dwellers?
No, it is Zanu PF thugs and so-called "war veterans", most of whom were infants or unborn at the time of the chimurenga, sanctioned by Mugabe and his government.
A small percentage of Mugabe's victims are white.
Those whites had prepared to surrender their farms and leave when the Second Chimurenga was won by Mugabe in 1980.
They stayed only because Mugabe himself eloquently persuaded them to stay and help build a new heterogenous Zimbabwe.
They employed hundreds of thousands of black workers and made Zimbabwe a net agrarian exporting nation until Mugabe kicked over the cart.
But most of Mugabe's victims, now and in the past (remember the Matabeleland Massacres) are blacks.
Whites are less than one percent of the population.
It is blacks who are being displaced from the farm villages
It is blacks who who are living hard in the bush instead of being gainfully employed on the farms.
It is blacks who are being driven into the cities to swell the ranks of the unemployed.
It is blacks who are risking crocodile attacks to cross the river into South Africa as refugees.
It is blacks who have to stand in line for days to buy maize meal and who then have to travel to the rural areas to share the maize with their parents who are being denied meal by government thugs. Meal which was promised to them to win an election.
It is blacks who are being beaten, raped, killed, starved and displaced.
And who benefits by the farm invasions? Landless rural blacks? No way.
It is Zanu PF cadre and urban civil servants with no knowledge whatsoever of farming who are taking ownership of the dismantled farms and who are busily destroying Zim agriculture with their incompetence and short-sightedness.
It is also a much smaller number of people moving onto the seized farms than were displaced by the invasions.
There comes a time when an adult must stop blaming his parents for their abuses during his dependency and to take responsibility for his own life. An adult who fails to do so is a psychopath.
PAMWE CHETE
In Memory of the Best
And now Zim has an effectively Shona government that is mounting the land invasions.
A Shona government that in the 1980s had sent the Norh Korean trained Fifth Brigade to Matabeleland to commit pillage, brigandage and massacre.
There is the most realistic hope for Africa-- the willingness of some powers to extend protection over tracts of territory.
The establishment of self-financing protectorates would be the single most decent act America and other Western powers could perform.
At some point in the future, self-determination may be possible; it is a cruel hoax today.
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