Posted on 07/13/2002 2:19:36 AM PDT by Clive
The social disaster in Zimbabwe cannot be measured. More than 100,000 displaced farm workers are now living wretched lives in refugee camps and another 200,000 are expected to be displaced within the coming month.
More than a quarter of a million children who were being educated in schools built and maintained by commercial farmers cannot now expect to continue their education.
Perhaps 80,000 industrial jobs will be lost in industry as supplies of agricultural inputs run down, or as their former customers for crop inputs are driven from the land.
Three quarters of the agricultural exports will come to an end with the destruction of commercial agriculture and the loss of this revenue will damage or destroy the prospects of survival of most of the remaining businesses and most other urban jobs.
The only political figure in recent history who comes close to Robert Mugabe's wilful destruction of the lives of his own citizens and his country's economic resources is Pol Pot.
Because Pol Pot's romantic, but absurd vision of the perfect pastoral life under a peasant agricultural economy could accommodate only about a quarter of Cambodia's actual population, he started to ruthlessly slaughter the excess numbers, choosing to kill any with an education or who showed reluctance to slip quietly under his totalitarian subjugation.
Zimbabwe's carrying capacity for its human population has been boosted vigorously over the years by industrial growth and the adoption of first world technologies, and the population now stands at about 13 million.
However, its carrying capacity if the people are forced to revert to peasant agriculture will be no more than a quarter of that.
The climate is too hostile, the ecology too fragile and the natural hazards of crop diseases and pest invasions are too destructive to farm successfully in any manner other than in the highly capital and management-intensive commercial methods that are now being destroyed.
By being forced to accept the basic farming methods of their ancestors, Zimbabwe's new farmland occupiers will face poverty and starvation on the million small plots being carved out of the 6,000 commercial farms now being nationalised.
If Zimbabwe's carrying capacity is to be brought down to three million by these destructive acts, the ten million who are clearly surplus to Robert Mugabe's vision of the future will soon become a major hazard to the stability of the region and areas much further afield as the waves of refugees spread across the world.
Like Pol Pot's ideas, they are doomed to fail. It is up to those of us who can do something to stop the madness in its tracks to ensure that it fails sooner rather than later, and preferably before much bigger shock-waves of misery and distress coming from Zimbabwe reach across the world.
John Robertson is one of Zimbabwe's leading economists
Robertson seems to be leaning the same way.
But then there is a case to be made that the whole world is in the grip of a volkerwanderung.
It seems to me that the time has now come in Zimbabwe for that Biblical admonition to seize the sword, and for those lacking a sword, to sell their cloak and buy one.
Or someone should pay Grace to do the deed.
Population reduction.
Learn something everyday on FR.
On the other subject, have you been able to work out the dates with events?
Senate Passes Bill That Targets Billions for AIDS Prevention, Treatment
On the other subject, have you been able to work out the dates with events?
We should give them guns and send them back.
I will bookmark it.
What does that mean?
Carolyn
I'd get out, and quick.
Carolyn: "What does that mean?"
It was an off-the-cuff remark, but I was thinking of the manner in which significant migration is stressing the immigration systems of the righer countries such as the European Union, Canada, Australia the US and to a lesser extent Malaysia and the Philippines.
And I was thinking of the manner in which the migrations, mainly from Muslim, is altering the demographics of the target countries faster than the countries are able to cope. Examples are New York, California, the Mexican Border States, Ontario and Quebec.
In the past decade, 1.5 million people have moved out of Metropolitan Toronto area but its population continues to increase, fed by "third world" immigration and spurious refugee claimants.
I had thought of it as a low grade, gradual, volkerwanderung, not the sort of mass hunger-driven volkerwanderung that I was expecting in southern Africa.
But then razorback-bert posted a link to an article that described it as a fast volkerwanderung.
Not just the mercs, also the Selous Scouts.
But what finished them was international public opinion.
Today, the white population is less than one percent of the population of Zim and it is an older population.
Let any white start an insurrection anywhere in Africa and the whole of Africa will unite against them.
Any crimes committed against the whites will quickly be forgotten or excused.
Any revolt, to succeed, must origiate with and be prosecuted by indigenous peoples with no help from whites or from mercs of any colour.
Western countries such as Britain can exert military force only at the explicit request of an African government, and then only with regional acquiescence.
From the looks of your home page, you have or had a stake in that country. If so, I hope the tragedy for you and yours was of a limited nature.
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