The CIA Knew Rhodesia Was Fighting Communism, and Destroyed It Anyway

The Real Purpose of the Cold War

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The sad fact is that we live in the decayed ruins of a dead civilization, one that began its decline in the 1880s, if not earlier, and was butchered in the fields of Flanders from 1914-18, with only remnants of it holding out and gradually dying in the decades that followed.

That civilization was called many things. The West. The Occident. The Great Powers. While composed of many different systems, from Prussian bureaucracy to the American Wild West, it was organized around two main concepts: ordered liberty and natural hierarchy.

Such is what set it apart from the rest of the world. Africa, for example, remained in the barbaric Stone Age and largely had some form of chief-ruled anarchy. Imperial China, at the other end of the spectrum, had a strict and defined hierarchy but totally lacked any sense of ordered liberty, or indeed any sort of liberty for the vast throng at the bottom. There are counter-examples, of course, but such was generally the case.

So, the West was exceptional. Within it, a man was, whatever his rank, generally free from arbitrary authority, free from the ravages of anarchy, and part of an ordered social system in which one’s position was generally defined but mutable if one possessed a great deal of ability or overly much fecklessness. So wastrel lords fell from grace, new men rose in their place, and society generally prospered while they did so.

Then World War I killed that. Everywhere from America to Germany saw high inflation, astoundingly high income taxes, high death taxes, and an unbelievably high loss of life that saw all of society’s best, from the top to the bottom, wiped out in an orgy of pointless bloodshed.

What followed was murderous communism in Soviet Russia, rampant Wilsonian managerialism in America, and nasty bureaucratic tyranny in England.¹ France, meanwhile, saw socialism and poverty while Germany saw communist revolts, anarchy, and hyperinflation.

Next came the Depression, which in America wiped out our Gilded Age aristocracy,² led to FDR’s brand of socialism, and ended the sort of liberty for which we are known. Britain saw much the same. Around the same time, the Bolsheviks were murdering ten million Christian peasants in the Holodomor.

And, of course, the crescendo of those dark currents was the Second World War. What remained of liberty was wiped away as country houses in England were taken over and used by the government (which often destroyed them in the process),³ Americans and Brits were arrested by their governments without cause other than not wanting Europe to be destroyed in another needless cataclysm, and governments mobilized all of society for an unpopular war.⁴

Thus came the Cold War.

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Listen: The CIA Knew Rhodesia Was Fighting Communism, and Destroyed It Anyway

The Communists

On one side stood the communist world. It stayed true to its aggressive, bloodthirsty roots and pulled an “Iron Curtain” over half of Europe that allowed it to tyrannize what was left of a region it had brutally raped and pillaged as its red flag-toting armies destroyed what was left of the old Prussian aristocracy.⁵ While extracting what it could from the Comintern, it pushed communism abroad, too.

Everywhere from Greece to Kenya, Cuba to Korea saw communist insurgencies, and in the places where it was successful, butchery on a grand scale followed. Tens of millions dead in China, killing camps in Cuba, a totalitarian thug in charge of North Korea, and so on.

So, the ordered liberty and natural hierarchy that had once made the West the West was gone in the land covered by an iron curtain.

The Free World

On the other side stood the supposedly free world. The thing was, it also wasn’t really free, and certainly didn’t much fight for freedom abroad.⁶

Take England. Once the land where liberty remained alive in the post-Classical world, it was wholly downtrodden by the mid-20th century. Death taxes were over 90%.⁷ Income taxes were over 90%. Rationing remained in effect into the 50s. Key industries — rail, coal, steel mills, etc. — were nationalized (stolen) by the Labour government.⁸ Planning permission was needed for any alternation, new construction, or similar projects, and houses were requisitioned by the government without just payment for them.⁹ Now, farmers can’t even sell farm goods from farm shops without endless bureaucracy,¹⁰ and patriots are locked up for pro-British memes that invaders find offensive.¹¹

America, similarly, has seen income taxes go from non-existent to painfully high over the course of the century, has seen family businesses destroyed by death taxes, and has made it near impossible to even store water on one’s own property because of endless reams of endless regulations from endless numbers of spiteful agencies.¹²

That attitude and those sorts of policies would have been unthinkable on either side of the Atlantic before World War I, and seriously questioned up until World War II. But, by the time that the Old World was ravaged by endless wars and taxation, they were resisted only by a “reactionary” few that still represented the mindset and spirit of their ancestors. The rest of society — the bureaucratic, industrial “mass man” and his technocratic overlord — generally went along with it.

But the anti-liberty, anti-hierarchy attitude that saw spiteful bureaucrats tax away millenium-old fortunes for the fun of it wasn’t just endemic to the West’s domestic policy. It also played out in our foreign policy during the Cold War.¹³

Cold War Egalitarianism

This is the central fact that many have a hard time understanding.

The Cold War wasn’t about “freedom,” “liberty,” or any of the other buzzwords used by ghouls in the Military Industrial Complex to sell more overpriced weapons. Though a few of the later “dirty wars” were an honest attempt to resist communism, that was only the case during part of the Reagan presidency, not the entirety of the Cold War. Rather, it was about destroying the Old World out of spite and love of egalitarianism.¹⁴

For example, there’s Indochina. First, we strung along the French, providing just enough material so that they’d keep sinking precious men and money into a losing war. Then we pulled the plug, citing “expense,” and forced them out. Next, we backed the Diem government just long enough to make Catholics unpopular, and soon had him killed and Catholics persecuted. After that came years of “land reform,” which succeeded only in stripping the anti-communist aristocracy of its resources so that there was no domestic anti-communist bloc of note. Finally, rid of the Catholic and aristocratic power that could have fought communism, we threw Vietnam to the wolves, and it became wholly communist.

Then there’s the Mediterranean. First, FDR and Truman tried forcing Churchill to bend to Stalin’s demands and allow Greece to fall to communism; fortunately for the Greeks, he refused, and it remained free. Furious, America got its revenge in Algeria, where we falsely portrayed the French as barbaric murders and thus forced them to withdraw and hand the country, along with the Pieds Noirs within it, to the murderous terrorists, and in Suez, where we forced the French and British to give up a canal they built to an Egyptian dictator. That essentially severed the old world powers from their few remaining eastern possessions, ending imperialism and replacing it firmly with the “Cold War.”

Everywhere the story is the same. From Burma to Equatorial Guinea, the stable old powers were forced out by American perfidy and Soviet advisors, not because the old European powers were bad rulers but because they saw natural hierarchy as a good thing on which rule should be premised rather than as something bad to be avoided. So the natives lost the stable, Western rule that had brought them ordered liberty and relative prosperity at the “cost” of, essentially, aristocratic rule. They got, instead, various horrid governments of their own choosing that ran the gamut from Peron’s populist socialism to Pol Pot’s ruthless, bloodthirsty agrarian communism.

That didn’t need to be the case.

But it was the case because the two powers that mattered for most of the second half of the twentieth century — the Soviets and the Americans — were committed to eradicating the old values that had made the West great.

Namely, they saw ordered liberty as needing to be managed by a technocratic, centralized government that hoovered up all of a society’s resources to then “manage” them, and saw natural hierarchy as a profound evil that had to be extirpated in the name of equity.

So, in their eyes, imperialism and its remnants, whether of the Chiang Kai Shek and Ian Smith or Pieds Noirs and Suez Crisis mold, was evil because it represented the pre-WWII state of things — a free, prosperous, and hierarchical society ruled by nature rather than ideology.

And that brings us to the CIA knowingly destroying Rhodesia.

Rhodesia, Rhodesia

Naturally, the sort of powers that preferred Pol Pot to French imperialism weren’t well taken with Ian Smith, a large-scale genteel landowner who was proudly “more British than the British,” ruling Rhodesia instead of some horrid, Idi Amin-style egalitarian. Thus, the intelligence state that justified Marshall in abandoning Chiang and China to the communists, was routinely infiltrated by the Soviets, and had proven suspiciously inept in Cuba was given a mandate of destroying Rhodesia.

Of course, the same types who couldn’t kill Castro or figure out how many missiles the Soviets had were inept, so the Rhodesian government wasn’t overthrown in a Guatemala-style coup. But, the intelligence services did do their ally Mugabe a favor by refusing to tell the truth about the Ian Smith government, framing it as “racist” so that it would be destroyed by evil men like Jimmy Carter and his friend Andy Young.¹⁵

Such is what has been revealed by, amongst innumerable other evidence, a now-declassified CIA brief¹⁶ from December of 1970, a point at which communist terrorists had been raping, torturing, and murdering Rhodesian civilians for years.

In it, the CIA routinely admits the Ian Smith government is incredibly competent at building a well-developed economy and functional society in the face of Western sanctions, and then turns to attack that success as being racist. The report’s summary is a great distillation of that. It provides, in part:

Since its unilateral declaration of independence from Britain in November 1965, Rhodesia's white minority government has successfully withstood worldwide hostility. The UN trade embargo has hampered economic growth and crippled Rhodesia's tobacco industry, but economic sanctions have not been strictly and uniformly enforced. As a result, the UN efforts have failed to bring the rebel government to terms. 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.

Not a word about the depredations of the “rebels” to which it refers, by which it meant the terrorists who were armed and trained by the Soviets and CCP.

You’d think the CIA would care about a communist insurgency attacking a state that wanted nothing more than to remain free and prosperous, and was extremely disposed toward the West by nature.

But it didn’t. All it cared about was the race of the leading elite, as shown by its slanderous depiction of the highly popular Rhodesian Front government:

The Rhodesian Front (RF), which first came to power in 1962, continues to dominate the country's politics. Although the RF does not rule completely unopposed, its white critics were unable to win a single seat in the 1970 general election. A few black opponents were elected, but they represent very few Africans and serve mainly as window dressing in a white controlled parliament. The great majority of Africans have no role in the political system, and passively accept white dominance.

The CIA even lied about history, smearing the generally positive relationship between the Rhodesians and natives, particularly the Matable (Ndebele), as a bond only so strong as that made by the machine gun. That was an outright lie,¹⁷ as the native blacks were generally on quite good terms with the Rhodesians, not living forever in fear of the white man’s guns and serving only because of that. In any case, the perpetually incorrect CIA said:

Armed with the maxim machine gun the company "police" easily subjugated the local African tribes, the Mashona and the more warlike Matabele. But in 1896 both tribes rose in revolt, and the Mashona fought a bloody guerrilla war that took nearly a year and a half to put down. Held in subservience, the African subsequently became a cheap and ready source of labor-at first for white-owned farms and domestic service, and later on for Rhodesia's mines and factories.

That’s not all. The CIA further lied about the rebels themselves, framing them as pro-democracy moderates rather than noting the very obvious truth that they were communist rebels. Further, it lied and presented Rhodesia as an apartheid state while characterizing anti-communist sentiment as “white reaction” against “racial moderates,” ignoring that the village chiefs and most of their followers sided with the Ian Smith government as well.¹⁸ It said:

Whatever resentment the Africans bore the white man, however, remained largely below the surface until the late 1950s when, as African nationalism began to sweep the continent, the political attitudes of blacks in Rhodesia began to change too. Inspired by the success of other nationalist movements in Africa, Rhodesia's own nationalists began to call for "one-man, one-vote" and to some extent they were successful in amassing a following, particularly in urban areas. Their own internal bickering and violent clashes between some of their followers, however, made the nationalists an easy target for repression. By 1964 the government had banned their organizations and had placed their leaders in detention.

As Africans became more active politically, the whites reacted by moving further and further to the right. The white voter's acceptance of the 1961 constitution, which provided for eventual African majority rule, seemed to be a triumph for racial moderates. But in 1962 the Rhodesian Front party, playing on white fears of social integration and black rule, came to power. Its avowed goal was to gain independence under white rule. After frustrating and often bitter negotiations with the British government, which refused to grant independence until the principle of ultimate African majority rule was guaranteed, the government of lan Smith unilaterally declared itself independent on 11 November 1965. In March 1970 it finally put into effect a constitution institutionalizing white rule.

It gets yet worse: the CIA, the supposed bastion of world resistance to communism, then goes on to downplay the communist threat to Rhodesia by claiming the massive Soviet and Chinese weapon supplies to the communist rebels weren’t evidence of communist sympathies amongst the rebels.

Yes, the CIA lied on the behalf of murderous, communist terrorists to attack an anti-communist country.

It said:

Although the Smith government fancies itself a "bulwark against Communism," there is no imminent Communist threat to Rhodesia. There is no Communist Party of Rhodesia. The nationalists of course do receive arms and money from Communist countries-ZAPU mainly from the Soviet Union and ZANU from Communist China-but their allegiance to Marxism goes little beyond their mouthing revolutionary rhetoric.

Such is what most of the remainder of the document says. At every point the successful Ian Smith government, one the CIA itself admitted had created a strong economic environment, is smeared as essentially a KKK in southern Africa. The communist terrorists, meanwhile, are portrayed as pro-democracy freedom fighters.

And this was a report published in 1970, during the supposedly conservative, anti-communist Nixon Administration.

True 20th Century History

The sad fact is that the CIA had about as much intention of fighting communism in 1970 as it did of obeying Trump in 2016.

The goal of the American apparatchiks wasn’t defeating the communists abroad, nor was it really to contain them. Rather, as the general trend of the century shows and the CIA report makes clear, it was to bash apart the old centers of power and replace them with something egalitarian, something that remains the goal of the powers that be.¹⁹

Hence why Smith was derided by the CIA and the Mugabe-led rebels supported by it.

Smith, in his wearing of a well-tailored suit, anti-communist rhetoric, status as a major landowner, and general worldview, was very much a man of the Old World. He acted as an African-bred version of a British gentleman at a time when the British were at their height, a time when England still valued natural hierarchy and ordered liberty, the very things he fought for in Rhodesia and would have kept alive if he won. Given that egalitarian America, whether under an outright leftist like Carter or secret ones like all of the Republicans, hated those values, Smith was hated as well and derided by the CIA.

Mugabe, on the other hand, was quite the opposite. He was a communist rebel, a man like the leftist-loved Malcolm X who was ready and willing to use violence against “white oppression,” by which he meant enforcement of basic pro-civilization policies. He wanted to expropriate without compensation the property of successful whites,²⁰ the very thing the high-death tax British and Americans were spending all of the Progressive years doing. And he spoke the language of “equity” and “fairness,” which the Civil Rights-mad US loved.

And so the CIA gave the pinkos in the American government all the rhetorical tools they needed to further attack the Ian Smith government and aid his communist enemies. It covered for their communist beliefs and covered up their atrocities, making them out to be mild-mannered and fair-minded agents of democratic change and hiding from those reading the report the signal fact that they were communists who tortured and murdered black and white Rhodesians alike. It slandered Smith and his government, downplaying their notable successes and pretending the one functional, non-apartheid in Africa was a “white supremacist” government so that it would be hated.

Rhodesia didn’t have to die. It stood for what the West stood for up until the disastrous 20th century:²¹ Liberty. Prosperity. Hierarchy. Those were key ingredients of what made the West special. When the British and Americans, along with the supposedly free states of the Continent, left them behind to chase egalitarianism, the Rhodesians stood by what used to exist because they rightly saw it as better.

But by the time it took a firm stand to do so, the powers that be were already at its throat, their egalitarianism having gone systemic and leading them to once again side with the communists to destroy one of the last real remnants of the Old World, of the freer older order. And so Rhodesia was defeated, falling after a 15-year effort against rebels backed by nearly the whole world, including the lying CIA.

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1.

2.

3. https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/10.3366/arch.2015.0076

4. https://news.gallup.com/vault/265865/gallup-vault-opinion-start-world-war.aspx

5. MartyrMade #24 - Enemy: The Germans' War, Prologue

6.

7.

8. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/shared/minitext/ess_labor.html

9. Described in Noble Ambitions: The Fall and Rise of the English Country House After World War II

10. As shown in Clarkson’s Farm

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13749599/Jeremy-Clarkson-local-council-new-project-Diddly-Squat-Farm.html

11. https://www.standingforfreedom.com/2024/08/think-before-you-post-the-u-k-is-now-jailing-people-for-social-media-comments/

12. https://www.goldwaterinstitute.org/supreme-court-strikes-down-administrative-state-tyranny/

13.

14.

15.

16. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP79-00891A000700060001-0.pdf

17. Discussed here:

18. Described well in Winds of Destruction, a book nominally about the Rhodesian Air Force that really tells the story of the Bush War and Rhodesia generally in superb fashion

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