Rhetoric of blame is now a white lie (AFRICA, HEAL THYSELF)

The Daily Telegraph ^ | September 3, 2002 | Tim Butcher

[Billthedrill]

Mr Mugabe's language was very dated, highly reminiscent of redbrick university common rooms in the 1960s.

Or, alas, their concrete counterparts on U.S. campuses right up to today. It's a consequence of following that neat little Marxian theory that nonsocialist government is merely the tool of an entrenched oppressive elite, used to grind the People's faces into the dirt, and hence the latter will be somehow liberated when it's themselves who do the grinding. That's theory. What happens in the real world was sung to us in the Who's Won't Get Fooled Again, "meet the new boss - same as the old boss." Or when Orwell's pigs started looking like humans and the latter like pigs in the last paragraph of Animal Farm.

Of course, it is never the oppressed who end up coming out on top in this way, nor has it been since Lenin decided his "proletariat" revolution could use a little jumpstart from a "cadre" in charge, and that it would be a really neat thing to be part of that cadre. The State that was supposed to wither away instead turned into a monster of corruption, coercion, and confiscation, and a permanent fixture consisting of a vampire kleptomaniac elite. That's a fair working description of Mugabe's boys, and like all kleptocracies, the real trouble will start when there's nothing left to steal.

[MadIvan]

The funny thing is, with handicaps like you describe, South Africa, at least when I first saw it, was a beautiful, wonderful country. I still have very fond memories of Pretoria, the jacaranta trees in full bloom, the beauty of the open veldt, just the wonderful feeling of being there. It is amazing that it was constructed with such a basis.

And now it's all gone.

Regards, Ivan

[GVnana]

I've heard it was stunningly beautiful. I know my friends missed the place. Hope they still export Pinotage.