No, Ian Smith and Rhodesia Weren't Delusional

At Least about Democracy

Welcome back, and thanks for reading! Today’s article is another about Rhodesia. While I don’t want to write about the same subject time after time, as I know that gets boring on y’all’s end, a very high-profile individual got involved in the Rhodesia discussion lately, and his opinion was abysmally wrong. So, in case others think he was correct, I want to dismantle it here, in a relatively brief and concise fashion. Enjoy!

Was Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith—and more generally the Rhodesian Front segment of the population he most closely represented—delusional about democracy and what Rhodesia had to do to survive? Did they destroy themselves not just by fighting a losing war, but by refusing to accept that it was time to adopt full democracy and move on, so that all could benefit? Could such a democracy have succeeded in this last outpost of Anglo civilization in the Dark Continent?

Absolutely not.

But it’s what Tyler Cowen, an economist and writer who runs a popular blog called “Marginal Revolution” and has been profiled in laudatory terms by The Economist (~26% of which is currently owned by the Rothschild family¹), told his audience, which is one of the largest blog readerships on Earth.² Doing so in an October 11th blog post,³ he wrote:

Smith is a wonderful writer, and remarkably erudite, more so than virtually any politician today. He also is delusional almost beyond belief. As the title of the memoir indicates, the story is all about the different parties who betrayed him. The British, the South Africans, and also some of his fellow Rhodesians. He blames almost everybody else, without considering the possibility that the Rhodesian system of “one white for every seventeen blacks, and without equal rights” (as was the ratio circa 1960) simply was never going to work.

…

The closest he ever comes to blaming himself, his party, or his decisions is when he writes: “Our crime was that we had resisted revolutionary political change.”

Never mind the fact that even the CIA admitted that such was the only crime of the Rhodesians. As I’ve covered before, the CIA noted in a since-declassified report in the mid-1970s that the Rhodesian state was immensely prosperous thanks to the wise leadership of its political class, had superb living standards for blacks and whites alike, was developing well, and had communist enemies. But the report came to the conclusion that it had to be destroyed regardless, for the property-based voting system it wanted to keep—one well in line with the Western tradition and open to blacks and whites alike—wasn’t fully “democratic” in the way that revolutionary forces claimed to want it to be. And so Rhodesia was destroyed, with the justification from those who did it being that it wasn’t democratic enough.

Listen to the audio version of this article here:

[Audio] No, Ian Smith and Rhodesia Weren't Delusional

In any case, Cowen’s attitude—one he has indicated in other posts on the subject too, such as multiple posts that tell an outright lie and claim Rhodesia had “apartheid”⁴— is relatively common. For example, right-leaning preparedness and survival author Don Shift, in his book on lessons we can learn from the Bush War, notes (emphasis mine):

Rhodesia fought with determination, innovation, and tactical brilliance. Its security forces developed some of the most effective counterinsurgency techniques of their time. Yet in the end, none of it was enough. The war was lost not on the battlefield, where Rhodesian troops and farmers often prevailed, but at the strategic and political level. The failure to win the support of the black population, the inability to offer a realistic path to majority rule, the overwhelming external pressure from neighboring states and foreign sponsors, and the limits of manpower and economy all combined to make defeat inevitable.

The thing is, such framing is inaccurate, and PM Smith’s argument is correct.

The Rhodesians did not lose because they failed to fully implement mass multi-racial democracy, and angered the black population in so doing.

As JRT Wood notes in So Far and No Further!, in reality, nearly all of the country’s blacks were represented by their tribal chiefs in the national legislature, even if they couldn’t vote because they were excluded under the property and education-focused A and B Roll system. They were largely happy with that. The Rhodesians invested heavily in community-building projects (such as infrastructure, schools, etc.) that helped them out, and the chiefs were fully on board with the Smith government, even voting unanimously for Unilateral Independence.

Malcontents could be found in any society, and there were undoubtedly numerous tribal blacks left unhappy with the system. But, on the whole, the Rhodesian system was providing them with a better standard of life than they could expect elsewhere,⁵ they were represented by their chiefs in the legislature, those who were talented could eventually build up the resources to vote, and so most were happy enough with the system not to revolt.

It was, rather, a small coterie of urban blacks—supported by like-minded urban black terrorists in America, such as the Black Liberation Army—who decided to revolt. First, they tried to effect political change through riots and urban unrest. When the majority of Rhodesia’s black population proved uninterested in joining them, they fled to communist-ruled Zambia and started a violent revolution with material aid from the Communist Bloc, political support from Britain, and moral support from America.

What the rebels were demanding was radical political change. They wanted the Rhodesians—men and women whose families built a modern nation out of virgin land in just a few generations, and who then saw blood-drenched refugees stream south from the Congo and Zambia as decolonization-based chaos set in—to destroy all their bases of success in the name of “one man, one vote” democracy of the very sort that had turned the Congo into a charnel house. Further, as even the CIA admitted, it was only a small group of urban radicals who were demanding as much.

That is, as Ian Smith put it in the passage scoured by Cowen, “revolutionary political change.” It was not some iterative policy of the sort many Rhodesians supported and offered, one by which “Responsible Government” would be maintained and strengthened as gradually more of the black population was developed and brought into the fold. Such a policy would have been sane and reasonable rather than revolutionary.

No, what the rebels and their backers wanted was immediate power. They wanted the whites to give up their government and put their faith in a collection of communist-connected urban radicals, against the better judgment of Rhodesia’s best men and the tribal chiefs.

Naturally, that was refused. Rhodesians could and would not countenance such an idea, particularly after they’d watched Zambia go from a prosperous land to a communist hellhole basically overnight, or seen the Congo go from a colonial jewel to a den of rape and murder with the flip of a switch.

They knew, in short, that “one man, one vote” had meant disaster in every African country in which it had been tried, and so refused that “revolutionary political change,” as Ian Smith explained to a hostile William F Buckley:

So, acting like lions rather than the craven geldings of the West who had given in to BLA-style black terrorism, the Rhodesians fought back. Yes, they didn’t do so in the name of mass democracy. They did so in the name of Responsible Government, government that worked.

Naturally, that government was primarily composed of white men—the “consistent drivers of history,”⁶ as the always excellent Charles Haywood put it—along with the tribal chiefs. The fact that such men did a good job of governing—certainly better than anywhere that was decolonized got, or than Zimbabwe got after it got to be on the receiving end of mass democracy—was deemed impolite, as such facts often are.⁷

But it was nevertheless a fact, one that many of the black Rhodesians recognized now and then.

Thus, it is wrong to insist, as Cowen did, that the Rhodesian system of setting equal standards across the races (standards that excluded blacks and whites alike if they were incompetent/poor stewards), “was never going to work.”

It did indeed work. It worked far better, in fact, than mass democracy. It worked far better than the “one man, one vote, one time” system of African dictatorship via democracy that the liberal West and communist East wanted to foist on it. In fact, while the decolonized countries turned into utter hellholes near immediately, Rhodesia, thanks to its stability-inducing system of Responsible Government, remained functioning even under the weight of war and sanctions.

Such is what Dr. Theodore Dalrymple, in Rhodesia in the mid-1970s to work as a physician, noted upon his arrival in the country. Describing what the old Rhodesia was like in the midst of a grinding civil war, he painted a picture that’d be inaccurate of most “First World” countries today, still less the decaying, decolonized world like South Africa or Zimbabwe. He said⁸:

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. The staff, mostly black except for its most senior members, had a vibrant esprit de corps, and the hospital, as I discovered, had a reputation for miles around for the best of medical care. The rural poor would make immense and touching efforts to reach it: they arrived covered in the dust of their long journeys.

Similarly, the CIA noted in its attempt to justify destroying the free land ruled by and for free men that the Ian Smith government—the white government that worked with the chiefs and was, as such, described as the height of evil by the democratic West—was doing a fabulous job running the country. It said:

After five years, in fact, the country’s basically strong, well-developed economy has begun to rebound. With a good year in agriculture, the economy grew by 11 percent in 1969, and exports rose for the first time since the declaration of independence. Although the new Conservative government in Britain intends to reopen negotiations with Rhodesia, the lan Smith government is under little compulsion to bargain and indeed seems determined to pursue the course it has already set out for itself in a new constitution, which embodies white rule.

And, as Rhodesian farmer Ron Morkel put it in his Rhodesia: Beginning to End:

From the time that Britain formally established the government of Rhodesia, and for eighty years thereafter, the land was a white-ruled colony and did seem to be a Garden of Eden in many respects. It was the pride of southern Africa. In those eighty years, the industrious government developed an infrastructure of railways, roads, cities, farms, and mines. Commerce and law flourished, the population had access to hospitals and schools, and game reserves teemed with life. There was so much food that the world considered Rhodesia the breadbasket of southern Africa, exporting tons upon tons of grain, beef, and cash crops. There were ample jobs in agriculture, mining, industry, and tourism. Rhodesia was self-sufficient…

Such was the picture painted by a visiting British doctor who expected to find a desolate waste, a CIA extremely hostile to the country and attempting to paint it in the worst possible light, and a farmer whose family was one of those that founded Rhodesia in the days of the Pioneer Column, and thus saw the full gamut of conditions in the country.

The picture painted is not one of a barren and disaster-wracked hell (though such could be said of the democratic, non-racist Congo). It is, rather, a land full of the “sweetness of life,” as Dr. Dalrymple put it. Injustices occurred, of course, and perhaps the voter roll system could have been better designed. But it is an utter falsehood to claim that it didn’t work, that it could never work, that the Rhodesians were delusional in thinking that with it they could succeed.

Quite the opposite is true, in fact. Their system did work. Given the state of the Dark Continent at the time, it created a relative paradise. It worked because of who it empowered—those who had shown themselves to be stewards of their own lives who could thus be trusted to steward the nation⁹—and in those whom it excluded: the incompetent, indolent, and dangerous.

Further, but for the great betrayal that Ian Smith describes and Cowen casts aspersions on the reality of, it could well have continued. South Africa, not beset by a decade and a half of war, lasted until the mid-1990s, and had a far harsher system. Rhodesia, as Morkel and Shift both described well, fell to pieces in 1979 because its farmers struggled to sell their products and families fled an increasingly violent war. Up until then, Rhodesia, even in a state of war, had been safer than most diverse American cities. But the combined weight of the world’s hateful attitude told, and so Rhodesia died.

To frame that as a political failing on the part of Smith and the Rhodesians is delusional. They had no other option: they could either do what they did, fighting communists while trying to maintain the system that worked, or give into the same force that destroyed all of the once-great colonies in their neighborhood.

People like Cowen demanded the latter, and when that day came, it was a disaster. The delusion was believing mass democracy could ever work.

That is, after all, why the Rhodesian story matters and remains relevant to us: delusional belief in egalitarianism, a desire to push ever more leveling equality despite the noxious and miserable outcomes to which it leads, not only destroyed Rhodesia, but will destroy us too if it is adopted here.

It is the great and excellent who drive history, who drive development, who achieve great things. Equality consists of shackling them so that they never grow above their stunted and incompetent “peers.” As shown by Zimbabwe’s history of destruction in the name of equality under Mugabe, such cannot be allowed to continue happening here.

Cowen, of course, refuses to contemplate as much and insists that only equality could have saved Rhodesia, a common thought amongst the equality-minded. The opposite is true: equality destroyed Rhodesia, and only staving it off could have saved the state.

Such is what Shift notes well at the end of Lessons from the Rhodesian Bush War: what brought an end to the glorious Rhodesia and a beginning of the dismal horror of Zimbabwe was rooted in the same sort of snarky, self-righteous attitude Cowen displays, the belief that equality works, that equity leads to anything other than disaster, that corrupt “fairness” is better than honest hierarchy.

Rhodesia’s fall wasn’t just the end of white rule; it was the beginning of a catastrophe for the entire nation, one that the West enabled through its self-righteous blindness. Placing equity above all else should stand as a glaring cautionary tale, but we’re too busy patting ourselves on the back to see it. The obsession with equity, in its modern political sense, has become a license for Western elites to play god with entire nations and peoples, convinced they can engineer fairness by decree. Rhodesia-Zimbabwe is a textbook example. The West, so eager to showcase its moral superiority, decided that justice meant handing power to African regimes, no matter how corrupt or bloodstained, simply because it ticked the right boxes for racial and political equity.

Featured image credit: Swimmer2025, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

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1. They are, however, trying to sell that stake: https://www.reuters.com/business/rothschild-family-sell-entire-stake-economist-axios-reports-2025-10-07/

2. While it’s hard to get overly specific data, some sense of the blog’s importance can be gotten from the aforementioned Economist article and from this conversation he had about the blog’s success: https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/marginal-revolution-20th-anniversary/

3. It’s a short post, but you can read the remainder here: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/10/ian-smiths-memoir-bitter-harvest-the-great-betrayal.html

4. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/12/what-are-the-politics-of-chatgpt.html; he claimed this in another post too: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/12/my-excellent-conversation-with-zach-carter.html

5. For example, Rhodesian blacks had three times the literacy rate of elsewhere on the continent: https://www.rhodesia.me.uk/rhodesias-case/

6. https://x.com/TheWorthyHouse/status/1888332805160976789

Another good post of his on this: https://x.com/TheWorthyHouse/status/1726373739435032893

And another: https://x.com/TheWorthyHouse/status/1887189495872618609

7. Dr. Bennett does a good job explaining this general attitude, in the realm of more mainstream politics:

Nobody believes what everybody believes

8. Such is what he wrote in this fabulous article: https://www.city-journal.org/article/after-empire

9. This is also a point that Clifford Dowdey makes about the Virginian system in his The Great Plantation: A Profile of Berkeley Hundred and Plantation Virginia from Jamestown to Appomattox