His mother's family came from England, his father's from South Africa. Lyn, his wife, goes back further: Three generations of family are buried in their front garden.
The couple once visited Europe on a three-month holiday; he hasn't been back since. ''It's the last place in the world I would want to live,'' he said.
After leaving school, Shand served in the Police Anti-Terrorist Unit, to fight Mugabe's guerrilla movement. After Zimbabwe's independence in 1980, many whites in Rhodesia, as the country was then known, moved to South Africa, fearing black rule. But Shand stayed because he believed Mugabe's promises of reconciliation.
Shand said he did not oppose land redistribution to help landless blacks. ''The majority of white farmers are in favor of land reform, but we want it done in a systematic manner,'' he said. ''Not like this.''
Like many white farmers, Shand has invested his hopes in a recent High Court ruling forbidding the state from seizing property if the banks carrying mortgages on the property had not been informed of the evictions.
But Mugabe has ignored unfavorable judgments in the past, and in a fiery speech Monday he warned his government would ''brook no impediment and suffer no avoidable delays.''***
Wonder what happened to Tucker? She used to be among the most disgusting shills for left-wing cause celebres' that I ever had the queasiness to read. But here I see her actually condemning a brutal dictator who was once beloved by the media.... darn! Must be time for the Second Coming...
Marx/Engles thought they'd come up with a plan for restructuring industrial societies (Germany in fact).
The plan only bore serious fruit in rural, backward, and unproductive cultures. The Soviet Union, attempting to apply socialism to industrial power, fell on it's butt inside one long lifetime. China's rural communism was able to oust one set of (Russian designed) autocrats only to replace them with another. Although the source of power and means of ascent changed, China is ruled today pretty much the way it has always been ruled. New mandarins and large armies to keep the masses employed and in line; still relying on population as it's prime asset.
While great wars were being fought, allegedly between communism and capitalism, the bottom half of the third world - Africa - devolved still further into rural marxism. Rather, into something based on marx and encouraged by a western inability to sustain leadership in the wake of a war that served to destroy confidence along with millions of people.
Even in the US, the apparent winner in the mid-century war games, recovery meant entrenchment of socialist policies simply by promoting those schooled in them during their brief idalistic phase and passed on to the hedonistic generation that followed. (Incidentally killing off or marginalizing many of those less inclined to self worship in a couple of smaller, "limited", controlled (?), wars along he way.)
So today we are not faced with socialism as the evil empire but as the insidious whine of entire continents and subcontinents unwilling even to attmpt to help themselves but highly versed in hatred, repression, and in manipulating their United Nations. We, he west and the US, look upon these nasty little people as our own failures; neatly enforcing the guilt our academics have assigned to "the white man's burden". This despite having spent fifty years attempting to assure that there should be no distinction between "white" and any other form of man or woman in our own society.
I truly do pine for the days when a broad ocean was sufficient barrier against the world. I also pine for the days when western civilization had some faith in itself. (I read about both in history books that are probably now long out of print & I'm afraid to look at their replacement tomes because I think I know what I'd find.)
Sorry, but I should now be able to suppress any desire to post a rant for another six months or so.