Am I From Rhodesia?

And Other Questions: Answer to the Q+A

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Welcome back! On Monday, I asked for questions, so here I am with answers. Thank you to all who left questions; that made this much more fun and helpful. Some were ones I didn’t think I would be asked, but were great fun to answer. As could be expected, many asked about Rhodesia, but a great deal of other interesting comments came up as well — from Margaret Thatcher to managerialism. So, let’s get into it!

For each person who asked, I’ll put their name as the headline, and the questions they asked as sub-headings beneath, answering one by one. That should make this a bit better organized. Listen to the audio version of this post here:

Am I From Rhodesia?

Subscriber John Carter Asked: First question: where is Rhodesia? ;) Second: have you visited Africa? If yes, tell us about it. If no, any plans to? Third: As both liberalism and American influence abroad wane, a great deal of cultural pressure will come off of African whites. What are the prospects for African whites to reassert themselves? Might we see a Cape Reconquista?

Where Is Rhodesia?

It is a landlocked country in southern Africa, to the west of Mozambique and north of South Africa. However, a bit more of an explanation is in order.

For many years, the country now known as Zambia, which borders Zimbabwe to the northwest, was known as Northern Rhodesia and was in a federation with the Southern Rhodesians and Nyasaland (now Malawi), a group called the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland.

That broke up in 1963, as decolonization took its toll, with Zambia and Malawi gaining independence from England and becoming ruled by terrible African governments. Southern Rhodesia, meanwhile, became the Republic of Rhodesia when it declared independence in 1965. It is that nation that I refer to as “Rhodesia” and which is highlighted on the map below.

Have I Been to Africa? Am I from There?

Unfortunately, I have not yet gotten to visit Africa, and I am not from there.

A bit more background might be in order to explain why. I graduated college (I went to Washington and Lee University, Go Gennies!) in 2021, and from there, I went to law school at Wake Forest, where I co-founded a company in my 1L year. I graduated in the spring of ‘24 and got engaged a month later. Then, I took the bar in August. I’ll be getting married in about a month, assuming she doesn’t run away at the altar.

All that is to say…I been quite busy and have not yet had time to go to Southern Africa, though I would quite like to. I suspect I’ll make my way over there in the next few years. When I do, I’d love to see some of Zimbabwe, do a hunting safari in Numidia or South Africa, visit the Western Cape, and visit Orania. I have a few friends over there, so I suspect I’ll be able to make it happen, and hopefully write about it on here! But no, I haven’t yet visited.

Will Reconquista Come as America Recedes?

This is an astute question and one I didn’t expect. I have said before and will say again that the only reason the Katanga region of the Congo, Rhodesia, and South Africa are the hells they are is that, were competent whites to reassert themselves in the region and take them over, something a man like Erik Prince could do in the relative blink of an eye, an American carrier group would show up and bomb them to bits.

This is, essentially, what we saw with Bob Denard in the Comoros Islands, what would have happened to Mike Hoare in the Seychelles, what happened to Simon Mann and the Wonga Coup in Equatorial Guinea through backdoor information sharing, and what would happen anywhere else. America has simply been too hostile to competent rule in the Dark Continent, something best seen through the lens of Jimmy Carter the race communist,¹ for those ventures to succeed.

However, that attitude appears to be ending. On one hand, our military is a hollow shell of its former self that, under Biden, was losing to the Houthis and lost to the Taliban. Trump is trying to pump some vitality into the armed forces, but it is unclear if America even could bomb the Boers were they to take over the Western Cape and secede. And, in any case, Trump is the first president since Reagan to be friendly to the Boers and their interests,² so it is unlikely he would bomb them were they or allied groups to try and take back over.

So, I suspect that, at the very least, we’ll see Western Cape secession in short order, as it is what would most help the Boers.³ Paired with that, it’s likely that we will eventually see a general reconquista of sorts in the region.

One difference with 20th-century imperialism, however, is that I doubt it will be as large scale or as kind.

Nation-states conquered swathes of Africa for prestige. Erik Prince, Eeben Barlow, and others would do so for mineral and agricultural wealth. That means that spits of oil-rich land in Angola, for example, might be reconquered…but not the whole country. Similarly, it would make sense to reconquer Katanga (the resource-rich portion of the Congo)⁴ and an outlet to the sea, but not the rest of the hellish region. Rhodesia and South Africa will, I suspect, be more generally reconquered because of the vast extent of their fertile, arable land, somewhat like how Rhodesia was originally settled for agricultural purposes.⁵ The same might be true of swathes of country that become privately held and protected safari parks.

But, generally, I doubt we’ll see nuns funded by the state to build schools in the Congo again. The Africans had their shot at such beneficent, paternalistic policies and blew it by raping and killing every European in sight upon decolonization.⁶ The next round of colonization will likely be of a sort that presents far fewer opportunities for such looting and violence.

Subscriber Evan Asks: What’s your position on Sam Francis’ thesis of managerialism?

This is an interesting question, and is one that I wasn’t expecting.

My general understanding of managerialism is that it is the process by which the running of capital was handed over to managers from the owners of that capital. So instead of Carnegie running US Steel or Rockefeller running Standard Oil, a slew of managerial personnel are in charge of their individual departments, and higher-ranking managers theoretically manage the strategic direction of the company and its overall operation from the top. In reality, this means absent but highly-paid executives and a host of petty managers constantly jockeying for position. It is, essentially, the application of the federal bureaucracy to corporate life,⁷ and is an outgrowth of Taylorism. At least, that’s what I understand the term to mean. Correct me if I am wrong.

I have mixed opinions on this.

On one hand, I see how managerialism is a natural outgrowth of our human capital woes. The United States is no longer the America of 1840, a land of hardy pioneers and frontiersmen who had been winnowed by the cruelty of nature and Indians into an industrious, highly competent, highly innovative bunch. There are still pockets of such human capital, but they tend to migrate into a mix of founding and working for entrepreneurial endeavors, not corporate employment. That is particularly true of white-collar work at small and middle-sized companies that aren’t glamorous and don’t pay well.

So, in some cases, it might make sense for owners of the capital (equity) to put the company on the back burner and find managers who do an alright job of keeping the dividends flowing and interest paid, even if opportunities are often missed because parochial managers are focused on their own departments and not a bigger picture. It’s unlikely they’d hit many home runs anyway, given the quality of those generally involved in stagnant businesses far from the first tier, so building a bureaucracy that theoretically keeps things from going terribly wrong is a reasonable response to having to deal with a pool of potential employees that is merely “meh.” And, given the middling prospects of the company, it makes sense the owners would just want someone else to manage it so that they can spend their time doing something other than running Dunder Mifflin equivalents.

On the other hand, managerialism is an absolute disaster, for the same reason that bureaucracy is.⁸ Namely, taking any steps forward that are anything other than incremental is a process that requires vast pools of responsibly directed capital, often over multiple generations.⁹ There is only one way to do this, and it is allowing highly competent, high-agency men to use their wealth for such projects and handle them intimately. The British Agricultural Revolution, the British Industrial Revolution, and the American Gilded Age are key examples of this.¹⁰ Only because a handful of men poured resources into innovations like field drainage, vast railroad networks, steel pouring, and oil refining were we able to escape the constraints on human growth and movement that had existed for all time until the mid-to-late 19th century. Had things merely been left to managers, which is essentially what happened to the soon-bankrupt Union Pacific railroad, it is unlikely that much would have been accomplished. Further, now, it is the process by which every corporation and foundation has gone woke: neither Walt Disney nor Henry Ford were gay leftists, yet now Walt Disney Co. and the Ford Foundation are the epitome of gay race communism. Had the families stayed as intimately involved as their founding members, rather than just handing things to managerial personnel, it’s less likely that would have occurred.

So, my opinion on managerialism is somewhat mixed.

Generally, I am against it, and I certainly think it should be discouraged. Owners of capital should generally be involved in the running of businesses built by their capital, and leaving things to managers — as has happened across corporate America — is generally a recipe for stagnation. There is a reason that Elon Musk is intimately involved with the operations of SpaceX and Tesla…it is his doing so that has ensured his money is spent well and they succeed. Had he just left them alone, SpaceX would likely be a less successful cousin of Lockheed Martin or Boeing, if it survived at all.

However, there are cases in which it is less of a disaster, and probably better wrangles the mediocre at best human capital available into something as effective as could be hoped. Businesses that are profitable but stagnant and are likely to remain so — for example modern railroading — are probably where managerialism makes the most sense and is the least destructive, as no great man is needed or is likely to rise, given the situation, and reasonably reliable and effective management of existing business and infrastructure is what is needed.

The “wokeness,” or general drift toward supporting the nearly always far-left “current thing,” is the other problem, as it tends to occur regardless of size or prospects nearly as soon as the managers are in charge. This happened to JP Morgan when Jack Morgan stepped away from the intimate details of running it, has happened to Disney, and has happened to countless other former family businesses; embracing the “current thing” appears to be a consistent vice of the managerial types.

Finally, I think we will see managerialism start to die out, even regardless of the wokeness issue. Elon’s companies show what can happen when a deeply committed owner is involved in the running of things rather than a series of managers. The same is true of Palantir, Anduril, and much smaller businesses like my friends at Smoke River Ranch.¹¹ It is the commitment of the man with the most on the line that seems to make them work, and make them dynamic. That is a huge amount of “alpha,” or above-market return, that I doubt will be left on the table as deregulation and tech advances open new frontiers at the same time as AI obviates the need for back-office bureaucracy. So asteroid mining companies¹² and the companies that retake Katanga are much more likely to be of the SpaceX mold than the Boeing mold.

Subscriber Pierce St. Claire Asks: What is your opinion on multiculturalism? Do you believe it can be established or practiced in healthy ways? What are your views on meritocracy? Seems like it’s great to have an aristocracy with noblemen doing what is best, but it seems it’s a dice roll on who is born with a noble character and who is born a noble. What is your opinion on Margaret Thatcher? I’ve only heard bad things but you’re the first to talk about how bad the nationalized coal industry was for the UK.

Multiculturalism

First, I think multiculturalism can work, but not in a mass democracy. Singapore shows this quite well, and the autobiography of Lee Kuan Yew (From Third World to First) is a great glimpse into it. There, they have Malays, Chinese, Indians, and whites. Yet crime, violence, and corruption are nearly non-existent.

That is because anyone is beaten for a minor offense and hanged for a major one, without mercy or exception. Further, democracy (and the media apparatus related to it) is quite limited, so politics tends toward being a referendum on policy rather than an ethnic squabble, and thus, things can be accomplished. Brazil, South Africa, and America, on the other hand, are anti-excellence, multicultural mass democracies¹³ and, as a result, have varying degrees of dysfunction and crime that are tied directly to their multicultural nature.

A historical example of this is the British Raj. When administered by the East India Company and the British government, Muslims and Hindus could live together, as they’d face repercussions of a most serious sort (such as getting strapped in front of a cannon and blown up) for getting out of line. But then the British left, democracy occurred, and millions died in a Muslim-Hindu orgy of violence that led to the separation of Pakistan and India.

So, you can have multicultural societies, and life can be quite good in them. But the moment they become democracies, all hell is let loose, and the path to dysfunction and/or destruction is all but assured.

Of Meritocracy and Aristocracy

Second is the debate between meritocracy and aristocracy. Frankly, I think the two go hand in hand, so long as reasonable limitations are placed on both. The thing is, even with an aristocracy, men of high agency can rise up through the ranks and become great: aristocracy merely gives them an example of behavior once they do so. This occurred in New York despite its baronial estates, the American Southeast despite its Anglo-minded gentry, and England despite its long-established peerage and gentry.

That is because restrictions such as entail and government-granted monopoly were removed and, as a result, high agency men could make their mark on the world, which they did in great numbers during the Victorian and Gilded Age. Men like Carnegie, Rockefeller, and James Brooke, the White Raja of Sarawak, stand as a testament to that ability of new men to rise.

Enabling such success from those men who are great enough to achieve it is, I think, the right focus. Government-funded pension plans that can’t be opted out of, income and capital gains tax, heavy workplace regulations, and the like are essentially a return of rules of old that calcified the upper crust and made it difficult for high-agency men of talent to rise. Only now those rules support an underclass that refuses to help itself rather than a military-minded upper class.

So, I think aristocracy is culturally beneficial and is likely to impress the importance of long time horizons on the rest of society¹⁴ — as it did through the Victorian Age — and the enemy of meritocracy, or the ability of high-agency individuals to achieve things, is not aristocracy but rather regulation on behalf of those of low agency.

Frankly, I don’t see an example of a period that struck a balance between “some” help for the low agency and letting the high agency do what they will. Nearly as soon as England started doing so with the 1909 People’s Budget,¹⁵ it began declining and turned into an impossible place to do business or build wealth. That slippery slope is just too slippery, and always ends in placing a yoke on the neck of the capable for the benefit of those who either refuse to be capable or aren’t so.

It would be better to, within the protected environment of a nation (so defended from without by tariffs, immigration policy, etc.),¹⁶ just let people compete and see what the high-agency types can do; the Gilded Age shows the sort of generalized prosperity that comes with that.¹⁷

A side note on this is that most traits tend to be somewhat more inherited than random, so over time and with deliberate marriage, the debate between meritocracy and aristocracy is likely to become moot, as the pyramid of societal wealth and position will broadly conform the pyramid of talent. There is historical precedent for this. For example, Brazil’s upper and upper-middle classes are far more capable and wealthy than the rest of the country. That is, in part, because they are separated from it by their generally European ancestry rather than the African and Indigenous ancestry of the lower classes. Such has been true across the Central and South American region more or less since the Portuguese and Spanish arrived. That isn’t necessarily a good thing, as it leads to societal conflict, but is true and something to think about; there, meritocracy is aristocracy. Or, in other words, Thomas Jefferson’s concept of a natural aristocracy is quite real.

Thatcher

I think Thatcher was, like Reagan,¹⁸ an utter disaster who cloaked the terrible consequences of what she was doing with some good actions foreign policy-wise. For Reagan, that was fighting communists in Angola, Afghanistan, and Central and South America. For Thatcher, it was retaking the Falkland Islands.

But, other than that, she was a disaster. She reversed some of the nationalization, which was good, but generally, her industrial policy was a mess that destroyed jobs and the English ability to compete in industrial enterprise, leaving the former leader in the Industrial Revolution utterly hollowed out.¹⁹

Similarly, it was she who, alongside Carter, ensured that Mugabe would take over Rhodesia and destroy it. She came to power in 1979, just as the war was in its final stages and England could have saved the country. Instead, she let it be taken over by the communists.

Also, much like Reagan,²⁰ she was theoretically opposed to mass Third World immigration,²¹ but did little to stop the tide, much less reverse it, setting the country up to be destroyed by mass migration from the “global south” over the next decades.

So, in my opinion, Thatcher was largely a mess, particularly for England and the former Commonwealth, and deserves orders of magnitude less praise than she gets.

An American Writer and Essayist Asked: How did you get into politics and talking about Rhodesia, South Africa, etc.?

Another question that perhaps I should have been expecting, but was not.

There are two reasons I got into the politics and history surrounding Southern Africa, particularly Rhodesia and South Africa.

The first is a bit of a convoluted reading story. It began when I read Jeremy Scahill’s book on Blackwater and Erik Prince when I was 10 or so, shortly after it came out. Though the book was supposed to be negative, I found Prince and his PMCs very cool. A few years later, I got a copy of Prince’s book Civilian Warriors the night Barnes and Noble put it on the shelves (I actually found it in a crate not yet unloaded before they put it out, hidden under the new releases table. They let me buy it anyway). Through that, I found I Am Soldier of Fortune: Dancing with Devils by Soldier of Fortune founder Robert K. Brown; in it, he describes subverting anti-Rhodesian US policy by smuggling Ruger Mini-14s to Rhodesian farmers so that they could fight off their communist attackers. Needless to say, I found that interesting and started learning more about the Bush War, which stayed in the back of my mind until I found a copy of Ian Smith’s The Great Betrayal, which opened my eyes to the political angle of the war and how America was involved in destroying the country. That led to my fascination with the conflict and my understanding of it as a lesson about what happens when the race communists are given free rein by the Civil Rights junkies.²²

The second reason is that I’m from an area ruined by much the same thing as ruined Southern Africa. My family has long been from Georgia (I no longer live there), both in the Atlanta environs and in the southern part of the state. It used to be relatively pleasant and had some southern charm, but now it’s a decaying, crime-ridden mess destroyed for essentially the same reasons South Africa was. Downtown Atlanta real estate is all but valueless thanks to rampant crime,²³ murders and similarly violent crimes are so awful that the one relatively nice segment of the city — Buckhead — tried to secede, and the city both has no public transportation that makes going out easy nor is it walkable…for the same reasons. Were we Singapore, a few hangings would make the city fine, if lacking in distinct culture or charm. Instead, rule by vengeful race communists is the norm and so the city is a dangerous mess. That impressed upon me the need to avoid South Africa’s fate, as it can happen here…it happened to Memphis, East St. Louis, Atlanta, Detroit, and elsewhere.

So, all in all, I find the region’s recent history interesting and instructive. Without abominable wretches like Jimmy Carter, it could have been a prosperous near-paradise for high-agency men of all sorts and provided us with vast amounts of critically needed minerals. Instead, it got the race communism treatment thanks to America,²⁴ a treatment we inflicted upon ourselves as well,²⁵ and so it’s an awful mess. Much like Atlanta, that could have been entirely avoided were these sane times, but instead, we’re supposed to bow before the false god of Afrophilia. I like my cities pleasant and walkable and my countries not ravaged by race communism, so South Africa and Rhodesia make for good lenses through which I can show where America is heading and what it must avoid.²⁶

Subscriber Dmitry Asks: From a financial markets standpoint, do you see comparable themes or widespread behaviors/similarities between Rhodesia and other modern nations? For example, did Rhodesia experience a notable kind of speculation, hoarding, or certain assets being in heavy demand, and do you see any of those patterns now? If so, do you think it's a harbinger of a similar outcome?

This can be answered as a whole. Two big things are at play: the benefits of being a relatively cohesive, agrarian community and how to handle your finances when faced with an evil government.

Hoarding

First, it’s important to remember that though Bulawayo and Salisbury were major, important cities, and Rhodesia had mines and industry, it was really, at base, an agricultural powerhouse. Thus, when it transitioned in part from a tobacco crop to a grain crop during the war and kept its thriving cattle industry alive, it was able to feed its population. Further, though it was landlocked, it was able to import consumer goods, first through Beira and South Africa, and later just South Africa. Additionally, its currency was stable, so high inflation and related speculative ills weren’t really a concern.

What that meant was that the Rhodesians remained well fed, thanks to their agricultural sector, and things generally functioned. There were limited options of consumer goods available, but no one was starving.²⁷ The nation as a whole had to hoard petrol, given its extremely limited ability to import it, but that was a national rationing policy for the war effort rather than private hoarding.

Adding to that, the Rhodesian nation, thanks in no small part to its immigration policy,²⁸ was a thriving and successful whole, rather than one riven by factions of the sort that tend to lead to anti-social hoarding. In other words, its unity of purpose and outlook was its strength, whereas diversity would have crushed it. So, though it was landlocked and surrounded by enemies on three sides, it had what people needed, though with limited options. Dr. Theodore Dalrymple, who worked there as a doctor, describes this well:²⁹

I expected to find on my arrival, therefore, a country in crisis and decay. Instead, I found a country that was, to all appearances, thriving: its roads were well maintained, its transport system functioning, its towns and cities clean and manifesting a municipal pride long gone from England. There were no electricity cuts or shortages of basic food commodities. The large hospital in which I was to work, while stark and somewhat lacking in comforts, was extremely clean and ran with exemplary efficiency.

So, no, hoarding and related ills weren’t really an issue for Rhodesia in the same way they were for the Confederacy or for toilet paper needers during Covid; in such cases, hoarding was severe, as was speculation. But that wasn’t so in Rhodesia, at least from what I have learned. That’s not to say such things were irrelevant, but it wasn’t an issue for the Rhodesians in the same way it would be for us, due to our diversity.

I think the reason for that is that 1) it was a nation of a very homogenous white population and a generally happy black tribal population, and 2) both groups were mostly self-sufficient in necessities. Because it could produce so much grain, beef, and tobacco, and the government had to keep a tight watch on the petrol supply, the typical things people hoard — food and fuel — didn’t need to be and weren’t hoarded by the population, which in any case was more united and pro-social than ours would be.

That makes the converse important for us. America is a net food importer at this point, with a beef industry that is teetering on the edge and increasingly exhausted topsoil.³⁰ Further, globalist outsourcing and cost-cutting has meant, as put in stark relief by Covid, that we rely on foreigners for our consumer goods, many of which are near-necessities, or at least treated as such. Thus, though we could be autarkic, short-sighted policies mean we aren’t. When paired with our general dislike of each other and overwhelming diversity, I think that means we’re much more likely to see hoarding than the Rhodesians were.

Financial Markets Under Tyranny

The other part of this question, if I can take the liberty of rephrasing, is: What lessons about financial wealth can we learn from Rhodesia’s fate?

There is one big lesson: If you worry that the government will become tyrannical, or that Barabbas-choosing voters³¹ will make it so, bearer assets are a critical component of any wealth you hope to keep. The sad truth is that, whether supposedly democratic or not, those governments that wish to do so can and will confiscate land³² and enact policies that destroy the value of national financial instruments such as stocks and bonds.

Rhodesians learned this the hard way. With Mugabe’s race communist policies, the land they and their ancestors held was confiscated,³³ the businesses they owned became valueless, their homes turned unsellable, their currency was hyper-inflated away, and they had to flee, often with nothing but the clothes on their backs and a few cases of minor possessions. White South Africans now face a similar situation, with extreme restrictions on moving money out of the country, and a government poised to steal everything from them.

Such are the situations where bearer assets — namely gold, diamonds, and Bitcoin — are extremely useful, potentially to the point of being life-saving and likely to the point of being more helpful than could be imagined in peaceful times. Which of the three chosen is less important, though the advantages of each are that Bitcoin can be transported most easily, gold has the longest history of value and use as such an asset, and diamonds strike a balance between the others. In any case, those are the main forms of wealth that can be transported, particularly when a government won’t let you move cash, bank accounts, or other financial assets (if they have any value left) out of the country. Oh how the fleeing Rhoedesians would have been better off had they had some money in such things rather than land, fiat, and local businesses! And the same is now true of the South Africans.

So, while rootedness is generally beneficial, it sometimes is quite valuable to be able to leave, and carry something with you that isn’t reliant upon a potentially quite unstable jurisdiction for its value. While we’d like to think such things couldn’t happen here, it’s always worth thinking about and preparing for, and Rhodesia shows why.

Thanks for your questions! Thinking about and answering these was a lot of fun!

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Featured image credit: Frank C. Papé, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

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OGC at the Movies: ‘Africa Addio’ (1966)

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19. https://shows.acast.com/anglofuturism/episodes/bring-back-the-captains-of-industry

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21. https://hatfulofhistory.wordpress.com/2022/11/01/rather-swamped-thatcher-moral-panics-and-racist-rhetoric/

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