Rhodesia Accuses

The War Against Civilization, On Behalf of Communism

My friends at the John Birch Society have, at long last, re-published one of the most important books written about Rhodesia’s fight for independence and the long train of abuses, lies, and deceits that led to it breaking free from Albion for 15 glorious years: Rhodesia Accuses by AJA Peck. If you would like to order it, you can do so from their Western Island Publishing website. I will receive a small commission, as an affiliate, if you do so. You can listen to the audio version of this article here.

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In his Rhodesia Accuses, Rhodesian citizen, politician, and lawyer AJA Peck dismantles the British smears and slanders of Rhodesia while providing a stirring defense of the civilization built in that little land and the reasons for which it embarked upon independence. Namely, he shows why “world opinion” regarding “one man, one vote” democracy was incorrect, and why Rhodesia was right to fight against communism and for the sort of “Responsible Government” under which it had long prospered. However, I think he does so in a somewhat flawed way, as I will explain in this review.

Rhodesia Accuses

The essence of Peck’s argument in Rhodesia Accuses, which was first published in 1966, is twofold. In his view, the Rhodesian system of government—a system of propertied voting updated to work in the modern world, about which I have written before—was worth preserving, and the British were perfidiously aiding communist African groups in an attempt to destroy that system and replace it with the sort of rule by kleptocrats and gangsters present everywhere else in decolonized Africa. He was indubitably correct on both counts, for reasons we’ll discuss below.

The Relevance of Rhodesia Accuses Six Decades On: Why You Still Ought Read It

In the introduction to the new reprint of Rhodesia Accuses, the JBS’s Joe Wolverton argues that the Rhodesian conflict and independence movement are relevant not just to those directly impacted or students of decolonization generally, but anyone who is concerned with the growth of world communism. As he puts it:

Serious students of the Communist conspiracy would do well—no, must—study this unflinching case study of Rhodesia’s internal struggle before, during, and after the 1965 Declaration of Independence. This is not a sterile chronicle. It is a battlefield dispatch from a war most Americans barely realize was fought—and one whose lessons we ignore at our peril.

Continuing, he argues that the Rhodesian side of the struggle was characterized by “imperfect…but resolute” patriots waging war against “the polished predators of the international Communist-socialist machine, aided and abetted, let us speak plainly, by the governments of both the United Kingdom and the United States.” Using that to connect it to Americans and why they ought pay close attention, he argues:

The comfortable illusion must end. It is no longer enough for American patriots to possess a vague awareness of “what the Communists are doing.” That kind of laziness has cost nations their sovereignty. If we intend to preserve our own republic, we must learn how political wars are actually waged and how they are won. That means mastering legislative language, exposing traps hidden in statutes, and identifying loopholes planted long before the battle begins. It means closing with the enemy, reading his intentions, countering his feints, and striking with precision when the opening appears.

Rhodesia Accuses is not merely a book, it is a declaration, the defiant voice of a people who refused to be silenced by the clamor of the globalist Left.

Such sounds much like today: imperfect patriots arranged against the multifarious head of a monstrous hydra, one that has used the sort of dastardly tactics of “political wars” about which he writes—namely the minutiae of civil rights legislation and Civil Rights rulings regarding that legislation—to destroy much of our civilization.

In fact, given that the rise of race communism across the West has made what he refers to as “the Communist conspiracy” an issue of enduring relevance for all of us even after the fall of the Soviet Union, his argument about Rhodesia’s relevance to Americans of the mid-’60s holds true.

Those who wish to understand why our fate seems to be so closely paralleling that of South Africa, which was destroyed by race communism after the Soviet Union fell, for example, would do well to study this work because the motivations and inconsistencies Peck ascribes to Western leaders like Harold Wilson are much the same as those of the “democratic socialists” against whom we are today arrayed.

So, what Peck argues is not just of interest to the student of history. It is a half-century-old warning against the dire threats we face in the battle to preserve our world, a battle that cannot and will not be won if we allow the same socialistic forces of race communist tyranny to trick, goad, and batter us into an inescapable and doomed position. That the battle is far advanced, and much of that against which Peck warned has already come to pass—from the Weather Underground and Black Liberation Army being given free rein to prey on Americans to disparate impact turning the workplace into a wealth redistribution program—does not make it any less relevant.

If we are to reverse that and win, it will be by learning from Rhodesia and the process by which it was destroyed. It was the blueprint for communist destruction of a free and prosperous state, South Africa was the test case for applying that to a larger polity, and now that war against civilization is happening within every Western land. Key to understanding that is understanding for what Rhodesia was fighting and how it found itself isolated and embattled, which is the subject of Peck’s work.

British Perfidy and Communist Aggression: The Great Betrayal of Rhodesia

The proper place to begin the story of betrayal about which Peck writes in Rhodesia Accuses is The Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. Formed in 1953, it was an amalgamation of Zambia (then called Northern Rhodesia), Rhodesia (then called Southern Rhodesia), and Malawi (then called Nyasaland). Those who wish to learn in-depth about the Federation should consult Peter Baxter’s Rhodesia: A Complete History or watch Zoomer Historian’s video on that period of Rhodesian history.

Relevant in the context of Peck’s work is that Rhodesia chose the Federation over Dominion status in 1953, when offered the choice as thanks for its valiant service in World War II, and that it chose the Federation because doing so seemed the natural thing to do in the context of Rhodesia’s success and growth in the twentieth century. Allying its agricultural might and large population with the mineral wealth of Zambia—particularly the copper belt—and added land of Nyasaland made economic sense, and was the natural next step along the road to greatness.¹

And so Rhodesia chose Federation. It did so, as Peck said, because “the greatness of Rhodes was in the blood of the Rhodesians”. This was to prove a mistake. The decolonization push soon came, and when it did, the Rhodesians found that they had been betrayed by the British. They believed—thanks to subterfuge from the British establishment—that if the Federation dissolved, they would be granted the independence they could have chosen instead of Federation.

As the other lands involved received their independence upon decolonization and the African nationalist movements pushing it along leading to the end of Federation, they had reason to think this.² After all, Rhodesia was a prosperous state in which law and order were not only preserved but fairly applied to black and white alike. They had no apartheid system, the political process was free from corruption, and their Responsible Government had done much to commend it. Rhodesia, after all, had done a far better job of developing its black citizens than the British government had done developing the blacks of colonies it ruled more directly.³

Yet Rhodesia was not granted independence as a matter of course, unlike the corrupt and communist-infiltrated Malawi and Zambia.⁴ Instead, the British government denounced the fairly and democratically elected Rhodesian government as an abominable and illegal regime…at the same time as it aided and partnered with some of the most brutal thugs and notorious kleptocrats in the region upon the decolonization of those states.⁵

Instead of receiving independence, Rhodesia found itself isolated and facing external pressure to give in and surrender to a communist-backed decolonization effort. The reason the British gave for this was that Rhodesia lacked “majority rule,” by which Prime Minister Harold Wilson meant black rule. As Peck notes, decolonization generally meant rule by a thuggish kleptocrat and a beret-clad circle of his cronies, not democracy and fair voting:

Mr. Wilson's grandiloquent phrase "majority rule" is a terminological inexactitude masquerading in the purple robes of a Pontius Pilate. Mr. Wilson well knows that in Ghana there is no "majority rule": one man rules—Dr. Nkrumah; he well knows the position to be the same in numerous other African states; and he well knows that "majority rule" in Rhodesia would today, inevitably, bring dictatorship by one particular man.

What this “terminological inexactitude” meant in practice was that the British were demanding the Rhodesians pretend they lived in the Cotswolds rather than the Heart of Darkness—a land they had painstakingly pulled out of the Stone Age in which it had forever remained until the Pioneer Column arrived⁶—and surrender themselves to the communists. The demand they faced, in short, was that they commit suicide atop the idol of the false god named Equality. Peck, describing this pro-communist insanity and the incorrect application of Christian principles behind it,⁷ notes:

Is it ethical to apply so-called “good” principles in circumstances in which they have no application?—such as giving the vote to ignorant illiterates who have not the slightest idea of how to use it?

Is it ethical to love your neighbour more than yourself rather than as yourself?— so indulging in the lunacy of handing to the Communists on a plate (if I may mix my metaphors) sundry perfect springboards for expansion in Africa, while spending millions in money and thousands of lives in opposing Communist expansion in Vietnam by force?

Further, the British and American “Conservatives” were really no better than the socialists on the Rhodesia issue, Peck argues, for they subscribed to “the deadliest fallacy of the Twentieth Century,” which he defined as “the widely-held belief that goodness consists in depriving oneself of the power to do good.” In Peck’s view, this mind virus and its results were leading to the extinction of Western Man, who had lost his survival mechanism as a result of it.⁸ Notably, the Lords tended to be better on this issue than the Commons,⁹ for such men came from a world in which they saw how power could be used for good, though they were really the last such generation to see paternalism in practice.

But, Peck argues, the Rhodesians rejected that suicidal mindset and instead embraced the “Civilized Man’s Burden”—the idea that the best men ought rule and do so in order that those who rely on them for wise governance may flourish. As he writes, staking out the general Rhodesian perspective of Responsible Government, “equal rights for civilized men” (as he notes, sharing swimming pools with those who don’t even use latrines is an unappetizing proposition),¹⁰ and resisting decolonization:

It is both our duty and our mission that we, the civilised peoples of Central Africa, both white and black, take up that Civilised Man's Burden. We, both black and white Rhodesians, must never cease to struggle to retain power in the hands of civilised men—in the hands of men loyal to a Christian-type ethic and with apprehensions quickened to observe the importance of maintaining constitutional safeguards.

It is our duty to bring freedom from want, freedom from encroachments upon human dignity, and opportunity to know daily the joy and fullness of living to every person in Central Africa; and, since we are not ethically insane, we must and shall, by force if needs be, preserve our country from the ethical vagaries of the insane overseas, from the dangers of its relapsing into despotic barbarism, and from the dangers of its being dragged helplessly into the Communist prison camp.

Such stood quite in contrast to the British, who had lost the will to govern¹¹ and often pushed policies they could only defend by engaging in a willful blindness about the reality of life in Africa.¹² Giving a few anecdotes of that reality to show how ridiculous the demands made of Rhodesia by the British were, Peck writes:

This African lack of money sense constantly dismays the European. The embezzling by Honorary Secretaries of the funds of voluntary associations is a commonplace. The loaning of moneys to the average African businessman is a hazard to which few Europeans will commit themselves, and numerous Africans venture into business with only the haziest of notions, if any at all, of the distinction between turnover and profit, and of the importance of allowing for depreciation.

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Indeed, the story goes that a particular African President, having proudly announced the "Africanisation" of his national airways, was horrified to find that the crew of his own personal plane had also been "Africanised," and immediately countermanded that particular order!

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This is precisely what terrifies the European about the outlook of so many an African. He lives regardless of consequences. He is quite prepared to take the motor car of state and drive it with gaiety, zeal and enormous gusto—straight into the ditch.

Rhodesia had no desire to end up in a ditch alongside every other decolonized state, so it resisted giving in to the “Communist Scramble for Africa”,¹³ however much the British and American regimes demanded they do so in the name of “democracy”. As Peck notes, democracies are nothing more than a reflection of those who can vote,¹⁴ so mass democracy in a land of those incapable of the most basic restraints on impulse would inevitably go very poorly very quickly. He and all of the Rhodesians who made the same point were proven correct by Mugabe.

But the British were adamant about “equality”, and so attempted to badger and berate Rhodesia into compliance with the push for a sort of mass democracy wholly inappropriate for a nation in Rhodesia’s position,¹⁵ or subvert it through perfidy and lies of the sort for which Albion’s politicians are infamous.

This pressure campaign consisted of everything from lies about Rhodesia’s distribution of farmland¹⁶ to ignoring even what the tribal chiefs of Rhodesia had to say about the political situation in the country.¹⁷ Paired with the perfidy with which the Rhodesians were treated—not least of which consisted of lies told by the British government in 1961 to the Rhodesian people about independence and future British involvement in their state—was a willful blindness to the threat posed by communism to the African continent, and the way in which “nationalist” movements were just communist movements in a slight disguise.¹⁸

In the end, Peck argues, this meant that the Rhodesians were standing athwart the world as they rejected communism pushed by subversives in East and West alike:

And Communist designs in Africa are quite simple: to eject Western Man from Africa so that Communist Man can replace him. The United Kingdom has most obligingly assisted the Communists in this regard by removing herself from such states as Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi and Zambia. Communist Russia and Communist China are happily expectant that, with its most obliging ethically insane principle of loving neighbour more than self, the United Kingdom and American Governments will now assist by ejecting Western Man from Rhodesia.

Is It a Good Book?

While Rhodesia Accuses is a generally fabulous work, it also has two flaws that somewhat limit its effectiveness as a polemic. That said, there’s still much that we can and should take away from it, as I will discuss below.

Such is what I will discuss below the paywall. As a reminder, if you become a paid subscriber, you get access to: every article, audio versions of every article, the transcripts of my history videos, and the ad-free versions of my history videos. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support my work, if you are not already. Thank you!