Thank you! There are a few of my other articles referenced in here that are better long form about the history of Rhodesia, but this is the first time i've tried to articulate the egalitarianism aspect in long form. If I can help with anything in the future, please just let me know
Fascinating read. We read it and discussed during our date last night. This assertion, that equality and egalitarianism are false gods, certainly seems to explain a lot of very bad current and historical fruit. My husband has been seeing this for some time, and I have been deeply opposed because it has smelled so strongly of racism, and we are now so culturally attuned to any inkling of that rancid odor that it’s difficult to ignore. But I think you’ve hit a very important nail on the head - that the rotten root is an egalitarian worldview that refuses to acknowledge the world is not fair. This begins on a personal level as covetousness and envy- “it’s not fair that he is so talented, wealthy, etc, and I’m not”, and moves very quickly outward into society if not dealt with at the root. Life being inherently unfair makes us shift uncomfortably in our seats.
It reminds me of the biblical parable of the talents, in which a master entrusts different amounts of money to his servants, some of whom invest wisely and give him a return on his investment, and one of whom does not. That servant is rebuked for not investing what he was given, so that he might produce even a small return. Have interventions like the civil rights movement been necessary to restore and uphold justice? Of course. But our society’s focus on leveling the playing field at all costs, instead of taking responsibility to do the best you can with what has been given, is ravaging the world, ourselves included. It turns out God knew what he was talking about when he commanded us not to covet or be envious.
US involvement in Vietnam gets so much worse the more you learn about it.
Remove the Nyugen dynasty in order install Diem as an American puppet, just to learn that Diem is anti-American and integralist in his policies. And he is successful in beating communism with minimal help.
Egalitarianism does NOT work and never will. You can’t make all people equal in all things and the most important thing when it comes to voting, hiring people for jobs or admitting a student to college is their capabilities. Do they have the education and make the necessary contributions to society to get the privilege of casting their ballot? Are they qualified to do the job? Do they have the grades to earn admission to the university? Different people have different capabilities and will excel at different things. Natural hierarchies exist for a reason this is what the United States and the West failed to understand. Giving everyone equal opportunity doesn’t mean that everyone will receive equal outcomes. That’s just impossible! Rhodesia is a good example of this. The hospitals, roads, railways, and airports all functioned well and towns and cities looked nice and were well-maintained. Ian Smith to appease the West, did the best he could to train up the cream of the crop of black society. There really weren’t many restrictions that kept black people in Rhodesia from advancing. The government invested plenty of money in black villages. Rhodesian society itself was prosperous providing ample opportunity for men and women of talent regardless of color. But whites still did far batter than blacks. Why was this? It has nothing at all to do with race or genetics but rather cultural differences.
Unlike in South Africa where salaries were allotted according to race with whites being paid the most, Indians and coloureds somewhere in the middle and natives the least, Rhodesia paid everyone equally regardless of color. Black doctors didn’t get paid a penny less than white doctors. But the major difference was that black doctors couldn’t achieve the same living standards as whites do to their social obligations to family. Mere equality of salary was not enough to catch them up with their white peers in this regard. Whites came from an individualistic culture and blacks came from a collectivist culture. A salary a thousand times what they made wouldn’t have made a lick of difference. For example if a black man inherited a villa, he would soon be overwhelmed by relatives and friends whom he had social ties with who would destroy the villa by among other things, bringing their farm animals to live with them. Thus why a villa lived in by whites would be in much better shape than that of one owned by blacks. This is why a civil service run by whites could do well but one run by blacks couldn’t. Not because blacks didn’t have the ability but because blacks couldn’t handle this responsibility given the cultural context they came from and were a part of.
America and the West failed to understand the virtues of the Old World. The aristocracy had to be wiped out by means of radical land reform and being taxed into oblivion. The old colonial powers as they saw it were evil and they forced them to dismantle their respective empires much to the detriment of the very native peoples they claimed to be helping. Rhodesia’s property requirements for voting were deemed racist by the Americans and the British. But they were not, they are practical. Rhodesia was destroyed. Aristocracies were wiped out. Great Britain was turned into a backwater where grooming gangs run around free. The Belgians were forced out of the Congo turning it from the jewel of Africa into an unlivable h***hole. Vietnam was basically handed over on a silver platter to the Communists. The United States is egalitarianism’s next target and to some extent is already here. DEI, quotas, set asides, reparations for slavery, the DOJ’s disparate impact standard, and the accusation that math is racist and must be dumbed down so that minority students can grasp it, are all examples of this.
What can we do to change the sorry state of affairs of in our world? We can’t undue the past but we can make the present better. Here would be my proposals. The West must discard egalitarianism and mass democracy into the dustbin of history. The United States must put education and property requirements on voting. DEI must be eliminated and identity politics purged from society. We need to create the colorblind and merit-based society that Dr. King always dreamed of. Britain must build a new aristocracy. Taxes should be cut. Businesses allowed to grow. Minorities in Britain should be taught empowerment and patriotism. Comprehensive immigration reform must be pushed through parliament at once. Mass deportations of illegal immigrants will be carried out. Assimilation and patriotism will be stressed to newcomers. Grooming gangs will be aggressively prosecuted. Stop and search will be revived. The police in Britain will be given more funding and resources. No-go zones will be stormed and gentrified. The cities will be cleaned up and beautified.
South Korea will dismantle hypercapitalism, return to being a more traditional culture, restore the nuclear family, raise marriage rates, and build lower density neighborhoods for families and children. Extended families should be encouraged to help in child rearing. South Korean children will be taught fertility education from a young age. Officials from Israel, the country with the highest fertility rate in the western world will be brought in to advise the South Koreans on how to increase their birth rate. France will stop apologizing for its colonial past and with the Vietnamese government’s permission open charter cities in Vietnam. The Belgians will follow suit in the Congo. Both will be consulted on how to run to that country’s government and reform and professionalize their militaries. As to Zimbabwe, the UN will pass a resolution condemning the crimes of Mugabe and ZANU and push for reparations and the right to return for all white Rhodesians. Every western country will place sanctions on Zimbabwe and put pressure on them to give up control of the government and hold free elections.
Yet another tour de force of a piece by Will! I for the most part would agree with you. The Cold War was never just about fighting Communism. It was also about vanquishing the Old World and pushing egalitarianism. The United States embraced Communism when it suited our purposes. This is underscored by the fact that we were hostile to Francisco Franco in Spain who successfully defeated Communism in the 1930s, we empowered the socialists in Italy, we sided with the socialists in Portugal against its fiercely anti-Communist government and refused to help them fight vicious Communist rebels in Angola and Mozambique, and we sanctioned and embargoed South Africa rather than assist them in fighting communist rebels in Angola and Namibia. But the coup de grace was America teaming up with the USSR and Red China to destroy Rhodesia. The Rhodesians would have been powerful allies against Communism and were more than willing to be a bulwark against it in Africa. They fought for a decade and a half to remain free, and fought vicious rebels in ZANU and ZAPU who who shot down civilian airliners and bayoneted the survivors if they didn’t torture them of course. There were racist laws on the books in Rhodesia, but they had no apartheid system and were a real republic NOT a tin pot dictatorship. It’s loyal citizens black and white alike fought like the devil against the Communists. Their vast mineral and agricultural wealth would also have been most helpful in the war against Communism.
The Cold War was not merely a fight for “freedom” (at least as America defined it) or against Communism. There was more to it than just that. It was a successful war to tear down the Old World and eradicate it from the face of the Earth. Hierarchy and tradition needed to go and be replaced either by the globalist Communism of the Soviet Union or the globalist capitalism of the United States. The local aristocracy needed to go and be replaced by rootless cosmopolitans that were varying degrees of tyrannical, focus of the material world over tradition and the complete and total destruction of the influence of the old colonial powers. Indochina is a prefect example of this. America provided drops of aid to France and then cut them off at the last minute allowing the Viet Minh to prevail and take North Vietnam. Catholics and businessmen fled South and French landowners were wiped out by the war and guerrilla fighters. America then proceeded to “aid” South Vietnam by sending in a massive infusion of U.S. troops who fought a pointless, badly mismanaged war and died in rice patties that were soon given back up to the Communists anyway. Instead of going all in and being in it to win it and bringing the full might of the United States military to bear on the North Vietnamese and their Viet Cong allies, LBJ did on and off bombing campaigns that were half-a***d and heed and hawed. Ngo Dinh Diem a competent leader who’d done a pretty good job running South Vietnam and was a friend to its Catholic community was assassinated along with his brother also a competent leader, in 1963. America then destroyed the middle class by going radical land reform.
Such reform had also been done in Britain as well and it was a total disaster, wiping away what was left of the aristocracy and landowner class and handing it over to the peasants who favored socialism. After destroying the Vietnamese ruling class, America left leaving the South Vietnamese high and dry and Le Duan and the Communists took the country and sent to re-education camps or outright murdered hundreds of thousands of people. We totally betrayed Vietnamese Catholics and handed them over on a silver platter to the Communists. These conflicts were pointless and achieved nothing. The French were the kindest foreign rulers the Vietnamese people ever had warts and all. The French, the Catholics and the aristocracy were all gone leaving the Vietnamese people with nothing. The Rhodesians are a shining example of what America’s second, more hidden purpose for the Cold War was. The Rhodesians unlike the South Africans who had a complicated shall we say, history with Britain, weren’t hostile to the British at all.
They loved their Queen, their illustrious history and their tea. In fact, one could say they more British than the British. They could have easily become independent after World War II but decided to remain part of the Commonwealth. But decolonization changed all that. The horrific atrocities perpetrated by the Simba Rebellion in the Congo after Belgium was forced out convinced them that breaking away from Britain and the European powers would be wise. Britain refused because they dared make property requirements for voting rather than practice the disaster that is mass democracy. British PM Harold Wilson a dedicated socialist threatened Rhodesia that they could either do as Britain commanded or be forced to fight both the Communists and NATO.
Rhodesia being a land of chivalric gentleman, chose the latter and fought a grinding 15-year conflict against the Communists in ZANU and ZAPU. The Communist rebels were ruthless they planted land mines on civilian roads, murdered farmers and farm hands and terrorized the civilian population black and white alike. The rebels were well-trained and received plenty of funding from the USSR, Red China and North Korea. Meanwhile, Portugal was the only real ally Rhodesia had and they only got sporadic aid from South Africa and Israel. The rest of the world embargoed Rhodesia. The United States gave aid and comfort to the rebels and Britain sent the Royal Navy to blockade the port of Beira, so the Rhodesians couldn’t import oil.
Eventually after putting up a valiant fight, Rhodesia fell and Robert Mugabe and ZANU was brought to power in 1980 with the West’s assistance. Britain even assisted Mugabe in his so-called “voting drive.” That being a terror campaign that helped him achieve victory in the 1980 election. Black and white Rhodesians alike were stripped of all their freedoms. Freedom of speech, assembly and the press disappeared overnight. Property rights vanished as well. All firearms were confiscated. Most of the white population was forced to flee their homeland. ZANU would soon set to work genociding other black tribes who they didn’t like. Chief among them were the Ndebele who were genocides by Mugabe’s North Korean trained thugs. So many similar stories I’m sorry to say unfolded throughout the Cold War and in the years after. Apartheid South Africa eventually would buckle under crippling economic sanctions. The apartheid system was undoubtedly brutal, evil and immoral. But the international community could have fought to end it in a more pragmatic more thoughtful way. As a result, the country became more violent than Somalia and became an economic basket case.
The United States blackmailed Great Britain and France with an economic debt crisis if they didn’t back away from the Suez Canal now it is under the control of an Egypt that hates the West led by a brutal dictator Abdel Fatteh Al-Sisi who persecutes Coptic Christians. Vietnam is totally under the control of an authoritarian government. Korea is a total mess. The Northern half of the country is under the control of a psychotic Communist dictator. The Southern half is so stressed and depressed by hypercapitalism they have shockingly low birth rates and could well disappear as an ethnic group within a few generations. Curtis Yarborough astutely remarked about how much better off the third world was before World War II. That is before the United States and the Soviet Union stuck their nose into it and turned the developing world into a living nightmare. To the United States, the political and social structures of the old world in the 1930s as now, were unacceptable.
The American's had racial communism forced upon them in the 1860s. From that point forward, the only real struggle was between which group of oligarchs would benefit most from the dissolution of tribal moralities (other than that of the oligarchs). The ruling class on either side of the 'Cold War' were more in agreement than dissension, but, like all good sharks, they could not trust each other to follow through on any agreement. The consequence of this stalemate was the various deterrence regimes that emerged over the centuries following the collapse of the Western peoples into degenerate racial amnesia.
Indeed, but the racial communism was gone for a few decades after Reconstruction ended, then started returning in far stronger form with the egalitarianism of the Civil Rights Era through present
A general support for altruistic notions of egalitarianism does not explain the juggernaut of combined economic, legal and military influence which brings about the ruin of whole aristocracies, cultures and nations. There seems to be an almost supernatural force at work, which leads to the rise of conspiracy theories about demonic, khazarian influences, like those theories which forever plague "the Jews", Zionists, Mason's, banker's cabal, "globalism", mafia-like security agencies or multi-national corporations. Jesus mentioned the "Synagogue of Satan" as a secret society in his own time. Could it be that demonic influence in our world has so much power to corrupt, undermine and destroy man's greatest efforts with such seeming ease? Or is all human development subject to an inherently cyclical pattern of meteoric rise and abject fall? Bronze age civilization fell, the classical age of Greece and Rome fell to barbarism, did enlightenment America and it's industrial revolution rise only to fall ignominiously? Are enlightenment, liberalism, capitalism, meritocracy and natural hierarchy themselves inherently fragile structures? Quite the opposite. Egalitarianism, in fact, is demonstrably and inherently self-contradictory. Therefore, it cannot be the mere notion of egalitarianism which has any intellectual power, this is only a false front, rather the destructive force in society is formidable and twofold: the psychopathic poison of the raw hubris of social and economic elites (the iron law of oligarchy), coupled with demonic energies which those elites consciously seek out and cultivate to centralize and aggrandize their control over their fellow man. It's not a conspiracy then, there is a cabal of self-made unaccountable elites above our known social structures, and in recent years technology has given them a huge assist to increase their ambition and tighten their grip over the world. In the past century they have probably instigated two world wars, and countless assassinations and regime changes. Today, they are promoting needless race and gender unrest, mass immigration, stolen elections and fake pandemics.
"If the goal was to fight communism, why would we {fight against aristocracies, fascists, and religious totalitarianism}? Rather, the Cold War was a successful attempt to tear down the Old World, a land of hierarchy and tradition, and replace it with either globalist communism or globalist crony capitalism." Wow, what a blind, one-sided revisionist conspiracy theory. Fighting communism doesn't mean fighting communism everywhere, at any cost, and not caring about anything other than fighting communism. There were excellent reasons not to support those regimes. You might as well say, "If the goal was to fight communism, why would we fight the Nazis?" You lost a reader in less than 10 seconds.
What nonsense. We have democratic liberalism, which is based on the solid bedrock of meritocracy, competition and hierarchy. And you are in deep denial if you don't see America's fall racing toward us like a trainwreck.
Fantastic guide to Rhodesia. Bookmarking for future reference. Believe it or not, The Atlantic and Samantha Power wrote a piece on Zimbabwe in 2003 called How To Kill a Country: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/how-to-kill-a-country-zimbabwe-mugabe-decolonize
Thank you! There are a few of my other articles referenced in here that are better long form about the history of Rhodesia, but this is the first time i've tried to articulate the egalitarianism aspect in long form. If I can help with anything in the future, please just let me know
Fascinating read. We read it and discussed during our date last night. This assertion, that equality and egalitarianism are false gods, certainly seems to explain a lot of very bad current and historical fruit. My husband has been seeing this for some time, and I have been deeply opposed because it has smelled so strongly of racism, and we are now so culturally attuned to any inkling of that rancid odor that it’s difficult to ignore. But I think you’ve hit a very important nail on the head - that the rotten root is an egalitarian worldview that refuses to acknowledge the world is not fair. This begins on a personal level as covetousness and envy- “it’s not fair that he is so talented, wealthy, etc, and I’m not”, and moves very quickly outward into society if not dealt with at the root. Life being inherently unfair makes us shift uncomfortably in our seats.
It reminds me of the biblical parable of the talents, in which a master entrusts different amounts of money to his servants, some of whom invest wisely and give him a return on his investment, and one of whom does not. That servant is rebuked for not investing what he was given, so that he might produce even a small return. Have interventions like the civil rights movement been necessary to restore and uphold justice? Of course. But our society’s focus on leveling the playing field at all costs, instead of taking responsibility to do the best you can with what has been given, is ravaging the world, ourselves included. It turns out God knew what he was talking about when he commanded us not to covet or be envious.
“property”. “ownership”. “responsibility”. “taxes”. skin in the game. you are now seeing why the us is in such a pickle politically-speaking.
Indeed
but “poll taxes” were racist™️
US involvement in Vietnam gets so much worse the more you learn about it.
Remove the Nyugen dynasty in order install Diem as an American puppet, just to learn that Diem is anti-American and integralist in his policies. And he is successful in beating communism with minimal help.
Egalitarianism does NOT work and never will. You can’t make all people equal in all things and the most important thing when it comes to voting, hiring people for jobs or admitting a student to college is their capabilities. Do they have the education and make the necessary contributions to society to get the privilege of casting their ballot? Are they qualified to do the job? Do they have the grades to earn admission to the university? Different people have different capabilities and will excel at different things. Natural hierarchies exist for a reason this is what the United States and the West failed to understand. Giving everyone equal opportunity doesn’t mean that everyone will receive equal outcomes. That’s just impossible! Rhodesia is a good example of this. The hospitals, roads, railways, and airports all functioned well and towns and cities looked nice and were well-maintained. Ian Smith to appease the West, did the best he could to train up the cream of the crop of black society. There really weren’t many restrictions that kept black people in Rhodesia from advancing. The government invested plenty of money in black villages. Rhodesian society itself was prosperous providing ample opportunity for men and women of talent regardless of color. But whites still did far batter than blacks. Why was this? It has nothing at all to do with race or genetics but rather cultural differences.
Unlike in South Africa where salaries were allotted according to race with whites being paid the most, Indians and coloureds somewhere in the middle and natives the least, Rhodesia paid everyone equally regardless of color. Black doctors didn’t get paid a penny less than white doctors. But the major difference was that black doctors couldn’t achieve the same living standards as whites do to their social obligations to family. Mere equality of salary was not enough to catch them up with their white peers in this regard. Whites came from an individualistic culture and blacks came from a collectivist culture. A salary a thousand times what they made wouldn’t have made a lick of difference. For example if a black man inherited a villa, he would soon be overwhelmed by relatives and friends whom he had social ties with who would destroy the villa by among other things, bringing their farm animals to live with them. Thus why a villa lived in by whites would be in much better shape than that of one owned by blacks. This is why a civil service run by whites could do well but one run by blacks couldn’t. Not because blacks didn’t have the ability but because blacks couldn’t handle this responsibility given the cultural context they came from and were a part of.
America and the West failed to understand the virtues of the Old World. The aristocracy had to be wiped out by means of radical land reform and being taxed into oblivion. The old colonial powers as they saw it were evil and they forced them to dismantle their respective empires much to the detriment of the very native peoples they claimed to be helping. Rhodesia’s property requirements for voting were deemed racist by the Americans and the British. But they were not, they are practical. Rhodesia was destroyed. Aristocracies were wiped out. Great Britain was turned into a backwater where grooming gangs run around free. The Belgians were forced out of the Congo turning it from the jewel of Africa into an unlivable h***hole. Vietnam was basically handed over on a silver platter to the Communists. The United States is egalitarianism’s next target and to some extent is already here. DEI, quotas, set asides, reparations for slavery, the DOJ’s disparate impact standard, and the accusation that math is racist and must be dumbed down so that minority students can grasp it, are all examples of this.
What can we do to change the sorry state of affairs of in our world? We can’t undue the past but we can make the present better. Here would be my proposals. The West must discard egalitarianism and mass democracy into the dustbin of history. The United States must put education and property requirements on voting. DEI must be eliminated and identity politics purged from society. We need to create the colorblind and merit-based society that Dr. King always dreamed of. Britain must build a new aristocracy. Taxes should be cut. Businesses allowed to grow. Minorities in Britain should be taught empowerment and patriotism. Comprehensive immigration reform must be pushed through parliament at once. Mass deportations of illegal immigrants will be carried out. Assimilation and patriotism will be stressed to newcomers. Grooming gangs will be aggressively prosecuted. Stop and search will be revived. The police in Britain will be given more funding and resources. No-go zones will be stormed and gentrified. The cities will be cleaned up and beautified.
South Korea will dismantle hypercapitalism, return to being a more traditional culture, restore the nuclear family, raise marriage rates, and build lower density neighborhoods for families and children. Extended families should be encouraged to help in child rearing. South Korean children will be taught fertility education from a young age. Officials from Israel, the country with the highest fertility rate in the western world will be brought in to advise the South Koreans on how to increase their birth rate. France will stop apologizing for its colonial past and with the Vietnamese government’s permission open charter cities in Vietnam. The Belgians will follow suit in the Congo. Both will be consulted on how to run to that country’s government and reform and professionalize their militaries. As to Zimbabwe, the UN will pass a resolution condemning the crimes of Mugabe and ZANU and push for reparations and the right to return for all white Rhodesians. Every western country will place sanctions on Zimbabwe and put pressure on them to give up control of the government and hold free elections.
Very true
Yet another tour de force of a piece by Will! I for the most part would agree with you. The Cold War was never just about fighting Communism. It was also about vanquishing the Old World and pushing egalitarianism. The United States embraced Communism when it suited our purposes. This is underscored by the fact that we were hostile to Francisco Franco in Spain who successfully defeated Communism in the 1930s, we empowered the socialists in Italy, we sided with the socialists in Portugal against its fiercely anti-Communist government and refused to help them fight vicious Communist rebels in Angola and Mozambique, and we sanctioned and embargoed South Africa rather than assist them in fighting communist rebels in Angola and Namibia. But the coup de grace was America teaming up with the USSR and Red China to destroy Rhodesia. The Rhodesians would have been powerful allies against Communism and were more than willing to be a bulwark against it in Africa. They fought for a decade and a half to remain free, and fought vicious rebels in ZANU and ZAPU who who shot down civilian airliners and bayoneted the survivors if they didn’t torture them of course. There were racist laws on the books in Rhodesia, but they had no apartheid system and were a real republic NOT a tin pot dictatorship. It’s loyal citizens black and white alike fought like the devil against the Communists. Their vast mineral and agricultural wealth would also have been most helpful in the war against Communism.
The Cold War was not merely a fight for “freedom” (at least as America defined it) or against Communism. There was more to it than just that. It was a successful war to tear down the Old World and eradicate it from the face of the Earth. Hierarchy and tradition needed to go and be replaced either by the globalist Communism of the Soviet Union or the globalist capitalism of the United States. The local aristocracy needed to go and be replaced by rootless cosmopolitans that were varying degrees of tyrannical, focus of the material world over tradition and the complete and total destruction of the influence of the old colonial powers. Indochina is a prefect example of this. America provided drops of aid to France and then cut them off at the last minute allowing the Viet Minh to prevail and take North Vietnam. Catholics and businessmen fled South and French landowners were wiped out by the war and guerrilla fighters. America then proceeded to “aid” South Vietnam by sending in a massive infusion of U.S. troops who fought a pointless, badly mismanaged war and died in rice patties that were soon given back up to the Communists anyway. Instead of going all in and being in it to win it and bringing the full might of the United States military to bear on the North Vietnamese and their Viet Cong allies, LBJ did on and off bombing campaigns that were half-a***d and heed and hawed. Ngo Dinh Diem a competent leader who’d done a pretty good job running South Vietnam and was a friend to its Catholic community was assassinated along with his brother also a competent leader, in 1963. America then destroyed the middle class by going radical land reform.
Such reform had also been done in Britain as well and it was a total disaster, wiping away what was left of the aristocracy and landowner class and handing it over to the peasants who favored socialism. After destroying the Vietnamese ruling class, America left leaving the South Vietnamese high and dry and Le Duan and the Communists took the country and sent to re-education camps or outright murdered hundreds of thousands of people. We totally betrayed Vietnamese Catholics and handed them over on a silver platter to the Communists. These conflicts were pointless and achieved nothing. The French were the kindest foreign rulers the Vietnamese people ever had warts and all. The French, the Catholics and the aristocracy were all gone leaving the Vietnamese people with nothing. The Rhodesians are a shining example of what America’s second, more hidden purpose for the Cold War was. The Rhodesians unlike the South Africans who had a complicated shall we say, history with Britain, weren’t hostile to the British at all.
They loved their Queen, their illustrious history and their tea. In fact, one could say they more British than the British. They could have easily become independent after World War II but decided to remain part of the Commonwealth. But decolonization changed all that. The horrific atrocities perpetrated by the Simba Rebellion in the Congo after Belgium was forced out convinced them that breaking away from Britain and the European powers would be wise. Britain refused because they dared make property requirements for voting rather than practice the disaster that is mass democracy. British PM Harold Wilson a dedicated socialist threatened Rhodesia that they could either do as Britain commanded or be forced to fight both the Communists and NATO.
Rhodesia being a land of chivalric gentleman, chose the latter and fought a grinding 15-year conflict against the Communists in ZANU and ZAPU. The Communist rebels were ruthless they planted land mines on civilian roads, murdered farmers and farm hands and terrorized the civilian population black and white alike. The rebels were well-trained and received plenty of funding from the USSR, Red China and North Korea. Meanwhile, Portugal was the only real ally Rhodesia had and they only got sporadic aid from South Africa and Israel. The rest of the world embargoed Rhodesia. The United States gave aid and comfort to the rebels and Britain sent the Royal Navy to blockade the port of Beira, so the Rhodesians couldn’t import oil.
Eventually after putting up a valiant fight, Rhodesia fell and Robert Mugabe and ZANU was brought to power in 1980 with the West’s assistance. Britain even assisted Mugabe in his so-called “voting drive.” That being a terror campaign that helped him achieve victory in the 1980 election. Black and white Rhodesians alike were stripped of all their freedoms. Freedom of speech, assembly and the press disappeared overnight. Property rights vanished as well. All firearms were confiscated. Most of the white population was forced to flee their homeland. ZANU would soon set to work genociding other black tribes who they didn’t like. Chief among them were the Ndebele who were genocides by Mugabe’s North Korean trained thugs. So many similar stories I’m sorry to say unfolded throughout the Cold War and in the years after. Apartheid South Africa eventually would buckle under crippling economic sanctions. The apartheid system was undoubtedly brutal, evil and immoral. But the international community could have fought to end it in a more pragmatic more thoughtful way. As a result, the country became more violent than Somalia and became an economic basket case.
The United States blackmailed Great Britain and France with an economic debt crisis if they didn’t back away from the Suez Canal now it is under the control of an Egypt that hates the West led by a brutal dictator Abdel Fatteh Al-Sisi who persecutes Coptic Christians. Vietnam is totally under the control of an authoritarian government. Korea is a total mess. The Northern half of the country is under the control of a psychotic Communist dictator. The Southern half is so stressed and depressed by hypercapitalism they have shockingly low birth rates and could well disappear as an ethnic group within a few generations. Curtis Yarborough astutely remarked about how much better off the third world was before World War II. That is before the United States and the Soviet Union stuck their nose into it and turned the developing world into a living nightmare. To the United States, the political and social structures of the old world in the 1930s as now, were unacceptable.
Thank you!
Great post. As a commenter said about my post on the same subject:
( https://zorkthehun.substack.com/p/equity-is-mediocrity-going-downhill )
"So many bases to cover, so little time."
I am sitting on a post ide for years by now about Kipling's poem "The white man's burden"
To find some sanity in the understanding of civilizational and culture wars.
It is intimidating because I can picture all the hate that it will provoke.
But it must be done. we should call it 'the thinking man's burden'
Thanks!
I am interested in learning more about Rhodesia. Any suggestions for a good book?
The Great Betrayal by Ian Smith is my favorite
Three Sips of Gin by Tim Bax is quite good. We Dared to Win is also solid.
Rhodesia Accuses by Peck is good as well
Thanks. I appreciate it!
Bravo!
Thanks!
Excellent article thank you so much!
Thank you very much, glad you liked it!
Idealism stem from enlightenment, and earlier from Jesuit Christianity, some can say...
Yeah I think it's the mix of Enlightenment liberalism with psuedo Christianity.
The American's had racial communism forced upon them in the 1860s. From that point forward, the only real struggle was between which group of oligarchs would benefit most from the dissolution of tribal moralities (other than that of the oligarchs). The ruling class on either side of the 'Cold War' were more in agreement than dissension, but, like all good sharks, they could not trust each other to follow through on any agreement. The consequence of this stalemate was the various deterrence regimes that emerged over the centuries following the collapse of the Western peoples into degenerate racial amnesia.
Indeed, but the racial communism was gone for a few decades after Reconstruction ended, then started returning in far stronger form with the egalitarianism of the Civil Rights Era through present
Racial communism was still national policy. It was never 'gone'.
A general support for altruistic notions of egalitarianism does not explain the juggernaut of combined economic, legal and military influence which brings about the ruin of whole aristocracies, cultures and nations. There seems to be an almost supernatural force at work, which leads to the rise of conspiracy theories about demonic, khazarian influences, like those theories which forever plague "the Jews", Zionists, Mason's, banker's cabal, "globalism", mafia-like security agencies or multi-national corporations. Jesus mentioned the "Synagogue of Satan" as a secret society in his own time. Could it be that demonic influence in our world has so much power to corrupt, undermine and destroy man's greatest efforts with such seeming ease? Or is all human development subject to an inherently cyclical pattern of meteoric rise and abject fall? Bronze age civilization fell, the classical age of Greece and Rome fell to barbarism, did enlightenment America and it's industrial revolution rise only to fall ignominiously? Are enlightenment, liberalism, capitalism, meritocracy and natural hierarchy themselves inherently fragile structures? Quite the opposite. Egalitarianism, in fact, is demonstrably and inherently self-contradictory. Therefore, it cannot be the mere notion of egalitarianism which has any intellectual power, this is only a false front, rather the destructive force in society is formidable and twofold: the psychopathic poison of the raw hubris of social and economic elites (the iron law of oligarchy), coupled with demonic energies which those elites consciously seek out and cultivate to centralize and aggrandize their control over their fellow man. It's not a conspiracy then, there is a cabal of self-made unaccountable elites above our known social structures, and in recent years technology has given them a huge assist to increase their ambition and tighten their grip over the world. In the past century they have probably instigated two world wars, and countless assassinations and regime changes. Today, they are promoting needless race and gender unrest, mass immigration, stolen elections and fake pandemics.
"If the goal was to fight communism, why would we {fight against aristocracies, fascists, and religious totalitarianism}? Rather, the Cold War was a successful attempt to tear down the Old World, a land of hierarchy and tradition, and replace it with either globalist communism or globalist crony capitalism." Wow, what a blind, one-sided revisionist conspiracy theory. Fighting communism doesn't mean fighting communism everywhere, at any cost, and not caring about anything other than fighting communism. There were excellent reasons not to support those regimes. You might as well say, "If the goal was to fight communism, why would we fight the Nazis?" You lost a reader in less than 10 seconds.
“Fighting communism doesn’t mean fighting communism” is a wild take
What nonsense. We have democratic liberalism, which is based on the solid bedrock of meritocracy, competition and hierarchy. And you are in deep denial if you don't see America's fall racing toward us like a trainwreck.