Rhodesia Is the Perfect Political Litmus Test

Why It Matters

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Many of you have likely noticed my recent focus on the post-World War II history of Southern Africa. Particularly, I have focused on how the Congo became the hellhole it is,¹ why Jimmy Carter² and the CIA sided with communists to destroy Rhodesia,³ how South Africa’s decline is relevant to us,⁴ how it decayed so much,⁵ Mandela’s history as a terrorist,⁶ and the egalitarian roots of Western and Soviet involvement in the region.⁷ This article will explain why I have done so, and the critical question that opinions about the area’s history answer.

Of all the countries and conflicts I have written about, I have focused on Rhodesia the most. I have done so for one main reason: one’s opinion on it and what happened to it stands as the perfect political litmus test.

Answering the question of “should Rhodesia and its Responsible Government⁸ have been destroyed?” answers nearly every other political question. One’s answer is a litmus test that shows whether you are a Westerner who follows in the same spirit as your ancestors⁹ or a modern man so captured by the propaganda of the 20th century as to accept race communism.¹⁰

Rhodesia presents that fabulous litmus test because both the root of and answer to any question about the conflict is moral. Namely, it gets to the matter of whether a government that discriminates on the basis of human capability to find and promote excellence is good and right because it leads to national flourishing and economic prosperity, or if it is bad merely because it is discriminatory.

Listen to the audio version of this article here:

AUDIO: Rhodesia Presents the Perfect Political Litmus Test

The old answer to that question, an answer considered normal by everyone before the French Revolution, is that what matters is that humans flourish. In such a world, the means used to form a government are not of primary importance, particularly when compared against the results of the government’s leadership. An emperor, king, aristocracy, or republic could be moral so long as the nation prospered over the long term.

This is not the answer given today. Rather, egalitarians¹¹ of both the Western mass democracy mold and Eastern communist sort agree that a government premised on partiality is bad purely because it distinguishes between men. That answer is maintained even if the basis of distinction is merit-based traits such as competence, stewardship, and perspicacity.

Sadly, that mindset—the idea that any sort of distinction or discrimination is bad—gradually won out as the 19th century came to a close and the disastrous 20th century dawned.¹²

Property holdings accumulated by the capable were taxed to death for the benefit of the incapable.¹³ Voting reforms¹⁴ took power out of the hands of the capable and put it in the hands of the mob.¹⁵ Kings were beheaded so that spiteful mutants could declare Year Zero.¹⁶

All of the evil men behind the Reign of Terror were deformed in some way, and it was they who hated the Ancien Regime most of all.

On and on the list of anti-Western horrors goes. The general course of things from the Agricultural Depression¹⁷ forward in Europe and the Great Depression forward in America is that the undifferentiated mass gained greatly at the expense of those who had shown themselves to be exceptional in some way. The whole purpose of the state became whacking off the heads of the tall poppies,¹⁸ which is to say erasing distinction in the name of equality. Further, what services to the body politic the exceptional had performed were largely ignored or downplayed to make the attack on them seem justified.¹⁹

But while the rest of the West self-immolated to appease the false god of equality, a paltry few states on the outskirts of the old world left the old spirit of excellence²⁰ and thumos²¹ alive. The best of those was Rhodesia.

It was the last sort of state modeled after the West of pre-Reform²² days, as it had property-based voting. Under the Rhodesian system, qualification to vote on the A list in national elections was through a mix of educational attainment and property ownership, with a sliding scale of ownership necessary based on different education levels.²³ An aspiring voter had to own Rhodesian property — whether national real estate, a domestic company, a house, or the like — to be able to vote in national elections, and the more education they attained, the less property they had to hold. Black or white, that was the only way one could qualify for the A list that decided national elections.

The point of such a system was to keep the incompetent away from the levers of power so that excellence could triumph and the unique nation²⁴ could flourish. The general reasoning of the system was that if someone couldn't obtain wealth or steward it, they would be unable to govern the nation properly and would instead drive it to ruin in the same manner that they destroyed their own lives or fortunes.

Naturally, the system was attacked as being “racist” and unfair because more whites on a total and per capita basis qualified for the A voter roll than blacks. Those attacks became particularly virulent as the Cold War wore on and advancing egalitarianism in its various guises became the core objective of both sides.²⁵

While critics heaped hate on the Rhodesians for their Responsible Government system, Rhodesia itself became a highly prosperous society.²⁶ For example, black Rhodesians had a very high average standard of living compared to blacks anywhere else on the continent.²⁷ Further, Rhodesia had a thriving economy instead of Zimbabwe-style hyperinflation,²⁸ an agricultural sector so successful that Rhodesia became the breadbasket of Africa, and Rhodesians were free in a way that the rest of the citizens and subjects across the continent weren’t.

Normally, that would have been championed and cheered as a terrific success story. However, in Rhodesia’s case, it was damned because the country’s Responsible Government-created success stemmed from exclusion rather than equity. Only allowing proven stewards to steward the nation’s prosperity and build its future worked quite well, but was deemed unacceptable by the democratic and communist worlds alike because of the exclusion that was attendant to such a system.

The Rhodesian system wasn’t an absurd or shocking one. It would have made senseto the West of a century beforehand.²⁹ But it was shocking to the world of 1965. That world considered it "racist." So, those who hated the idea of excellence being championed instead of equality were given a free hand to destroy it.³⁰

That, to return to the point of this article, is why Rhodesia is such a good litmus test. One who supports Rhodesia is one who stands in the traditions and footsteps of their ancestors.

To one with the mindset of earned hierarchy that built the West,³¹ excluding the incompetent from choosing or being government officials is a perfectly prudent and reasonable idea. To such a person, excluding the incompetent from the levers of power is generally seen as a good idea for the obvious reason that the incompetent are incompetent. Keeping them out of government was and should be seen as not only sensible but so obvious as to go unstated.

Rhodesia vindicates that belief. Its history under PM Ian Smith compared to its history under Mugabe — a tale of genocide, tyranny, expropriation, and inflation³² — shows that Smith's way worked better. Rhodesia’s history shows that hierarchy, exclusion, and responsibility are orders of magnitude more effective at producing good outcomes for all involved than mass democracy or its inevitable African antecedent —kleptocratic dictatorship.

That shouldn’t be surprising to any reader of history. Even the "democratic" city states in Greece tended to exclude the unpropertied³³ from voting, as did republics like early America and nearly every other historical republic or democracy.

But it’s also why the anti-Western race communists and egalitarians hated Rhodesia to the point of ensuring it lost the Bush War, and still despise those who bring it up today.

To the race communists, the effectiveness of Ian Smith and his predecessors in feeding their people and building a nation from virgin soil doesn't matter. It didn’t matter that Rhodesia was the breadbasket of Africa, and Zimbabwe became a basket case. To them, what matters is paying lip service to and enacting punitive laws in favor of the vague concept of "equality." By that, they largely meant denying differences between groups and having a government premised on eradicating any differences that become obvious.³⁴ In Rhodesia's case, that meant “one man, one vote, one time” mass democracy, which the egalitarian West and communist East were happy to accept as "equality."

So, which matters more to you: 1) that Ian Smith and his predecessors were highly effective leaders who made their country prosperous and well fed with a high standard of living, or 2) that Mugabe, despite being evil, genociding an opposing tribe, starving his people, and impoverishing the country, gave lip service to "equality" and hated whites?

How one answers that question shows one's mindset. Do you prefer hierarchy that succeeds, or egalitarianism that fails? One is Western Civilization up until a century ago, and the other is race communism.

A shocking number of people care more about the lip service to equality. It is, after all, why Britain and America helped the communists destroy Rhodesia, and represents what our rulers have inflicted upon us.³⁵

Featured image credit: By J P Asher - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=32398454

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8. Essentially, this meant republican government with strict voting qualifications, mainly around property ownership and educational attainment. Here is a reasonably good article on the origin of the term, and how it was quality-based rather than race-based:

https://academic.oup.com/histres/article/97/275/147/7472041

9. Discussed some here, in my first big article on Rhodesia:

10.

11. What I mean by that is discussed here:

12. The general concept of this war on distinction and difference is discussed in this article:

13. Discussed here:

14. Discussed in this thread on X: https://x.com/Will_Tanner_1/status/1856364512481337843

15. How I think about mob rule:

16. Noted here, for example: https://x.com/DEI4WhiteGuys/status/1869453997494669372

17. That depression is a very interesting period:

18. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome

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20. My friend Alexander Svetski wrote a great book about excellence called The Bushido of Bitcoin, and wrote an article for us on it here:

21. Discussed here:

22. The Reform Bill of 1832 dramatically expanded who qualified to vote. It and the repeal of the Corn Laws signaled the demise of the old order in England, much as Andrew Jackson’s voting reforms replaced republicanism with mass democracy in America

23. The system is described well here (the 2025 USD equivalent would be around $50,000): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_Southern_Rhodesia

24. Defending the nation’s unique culture was a goal of Rhodesia’s immigration system as well:

25. Discussed here:

26. This is something that even the hostile CIA (cited above) admitted, noting that the country was thriving because of its stable government while the rest of the continent fell apart. While that was in the ‘60s, the same was true of it from roughly the turn of the century on

27. For example, the literacy rate of black Rhodesians was 3x what it was for other black Africans: https://www.rhodesia.me.uk/rhodesias-case/

28. This is much in contrast to hyperinflation prone Zimbabwe:

29. Similarities to America discussed here:

30.

31. Here I discuss this mindset with my friend John Carter:

32. That sad tale discussed here:

33. Discussed well in this thread: https://x.com/CCrowley100/status/1898822303397376174

34. Discussed here:

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