Posted on 06/17/2002 1:35:28 PM PDT by DaveCooper
Today, more than a million people in Zimbabwe are starving, and up to three million face the imminent prospect of starvation. This has not yet excited much attention in the West. Zimbabwe, after all, is far away from the centers of American interest; all of our top reporters are in Kandahar and Karachi.
But this case is important, not because of any direct effect it may have on the United States, but because it is a pure, distilled example of the larger trend that is destroying the world: the West’s loss of moral confidence.
That loss of confidence is codified in the doctrines of the academic left. The same folks who brought us “postmodernism” and “multiculturalism” brought us another variation on the same theme: “post-colonialism.” In today’s academic code words, “post-“ really means “anti-.” “Post-colonialism” is the theory that every evil in the world is caused by Western powers trying to assert control over non-Western countries. More fundamentally, the post-colonialists condemn any attempt by the West to assert the superiority of our ideals — narrow notions like individual rights and the rule of law — over the primitive way of life of “indigenous peoples.”
Everything that is happening in Zimbabwe is being done in full accord with the doctrines of post-colonialism. If every evil is caused by colonialism, then the heart of the problem must be the colonists themselves. In Zimbabwe, that means thousands of white British farmers who settled in Zimbabwe’s sparsely populated countryside and built a prosperous agricultural economy. The settler’s use of Western agricultural techniques, combined with the benefits of British law and order, made Zimbabwe into the breadbasket of southern Africa, an exporter of grain on which all of its neighbors relied. But in accordance with leftist philosophy, Zimbabwe’s post-colonial ruler, Robert Mugabe, denounced the white farmers and hatched a scheme for “land reform.”
In the language of tin-pot dictatorships, “reform” means “theft.” For years, Mugabe has allowed armed gangs to occupy white-owned farms, sometimes murdering the owners, as a precursor to a plan to seize the farms, allegedly for redistribution to poor blacks. (In reality, the farms are going to Mugabe’s cronies.)
The result? People are starving in Zimbabwe, not because there is a drought, but because hundreds of thousands of acres of crops have not been planted. Some farms are fallow because they are occupied by armed thugs. Others are unused because of a law threatening white farmers with two years in prison if they plant without government permission, which has not been given. Other farms are unplanted simply because no one in his right mind would go to the trouble of planting crops that will be seized before he can harvest them.
When you make war on the farmers, what can you expect but famine?
Mugabe’s justification for this disastrous policy is pure post-colonialism: “Land, being the most important natural resource of any country, must belong to . . . the indigenous people.” This is also, you might have noticed, an explicit policy of racism: whites must have their farms seized because they are not black.
Now Mugabe is following the playbook of history’s more ruthless dictators: using famine to liquidate his political opposition. But he is going one better by getting the United Nations to help him starve his opponents. Here is how Shari Eppel, the director of the African civil-rights group Amani Trust, describes the process: “International food donors are setting up feeding centers aimed at destitute families, but once the donors have moved on, the bullies move in and decide who gets fed and who doesn’t.” Even the relatives and children of opposition supporters are condemned to starvation.
How can the United Nations allow this? The U.N. and its Western donors are just playing along with the post-colonialist ground rules. The West is supposed to regard Africa’s poverty as the product of our evil interference, never mind the facts. So it's our duty to send buckets of money and food — but we are not supposed to enforce any rules on how the money is spent or how the food is distributed, because that kind of control would, after all, be colonialism.
In the middle of the famine he created, Mugabe had the effrontery this week to attend a U.N.-sponsored World Food Summit in Rome. There, representatives from African nations dined lavishly while they blamed their famines on the West’s failure to give more aid.
Welcome to the “post-colonialist” world, where Third World dictators blame the West for their sins. The West caves in — and lets the dictators keep on sinning.
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You guys know of a Booker T. Washington type in Zim? They need to all try to work together- Black, White and everyone else who wants to stay there.
There's probably dozens of them ... all being starved because they're not "FOMs" (Friends Of Mugabe).
"There's probably dozens of them ... all being starved because they're not "FOMs" (Friends Of Mugabe)."
More like thousands of them.
Of the 4,500 or so commercial farmers in Zim, about 15% are black.
They fare no better than their white neighbours unless they are cronies of Mugabe, which is unlikely.
Also, thousands of farm employees have been driven out of their homes and off the land.
These are the people who know how to farm the veldt.
Veldt farming is technological farming.
Mugabe cronies are occupying the best farms as amateur gentlemen farmers. These are air force and army generals, high ranking police officers, cabinet ministers, senior civil servents, Mugabe's sister and Mugabe's cronies.
The rest of the invaded farms are occupied by former city dwellers or, at best, settlers whose experience is black alluvial soil farming and not red veldt soil farming.
So, the highly technological agrarian sector, a net exporter of food, has become a mix of hobby farms and subsistence, slash and burn, scratch agriculture.
Animal husbandry has degenerated into a process of poaching and snaring of cattle and wild herds combined with overstressing the ranges by bringing in communal cattle beyond the range's capacity and spreading hoof-and-mouth disease and anthrax by mixing communal herds and wildlife with commercial cattle, with arson of the veldt thrown in for good measure.
It is the height of mean-spiritedness not to give them aid. Thier people are starving!
Besides, everyone KNOWS that the Universe is a racist place!!! ALL of the remaining white-owned farms are doing great but the other ones are all facing famine!?!?!
Whenever a white farm is brutally conquered... I mean LIBERATED, a famine hits the VERY SAME FARM!!!
I think the Colonial oppressors have rigged the weather patterns!!! I bet it is with the help of thier Zionist masters who as we all know have thier Death-BAse on the moon!!!
I think we need to send them a trillion dollars! As well as ALL of our food! I bet they would still starve... LOL!
OH NO there goes my self-esteem right out the window. I FEEL oh so bad.
I've got a great idea, why don't these (so called) academic get off their fat a$$es and go over there and do something construtive.
Here endth the rant #48,970.
Since I'm not a lefty academic this cleared things up for me too. They use all kinds of deconstructionist babble on campus such as "text" "gender" and so on..........
They have a number of these standard verbal tics by which they can be recognized. Gratuitous plurals are one, as in "homosexualities," a favorite term intended to convey the great insight that not all homosexuals are alike. But not even Jerry Falwell thinks this! When I saw the home decorating section of the New York Times Sunday Magazine headlined "domesticities" a few months ago, I knew for sure that some deconstructionist young pup had finally made it to the editorial chair.......
He got a parody of deconstructionist analysis, "The Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," published in a deconstructionist magazine, Social Text, without telling them it was a parody just to prove how stupid this all is.....
For example, one favorite deconstructionist idea is that, to put it bluntly, words have no meaning. (They call this the infinite play of the signifier.) I like to ask them whether they think this applies to tenure contracts, specifically theirs. Or to the writing on their paycheck. If you are in college or know someone who is, try asking this question, or try having it asked, to a professor who believes in this stuff. I am collecting responses to be published in a future article.
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