We're All Rhodesians Now

The Regime and Its Backers Want to Turn the Whole World Into Zimbabwe. The One Solution is to Say "This Far and No Further"

Life Amongst the Ruins

We stand today in the ruins of civilization. Much as the 9th Century Anglo-Saxons looked at the stone works of the Romans and thought they must have been giants,¹ or the Greeks of the post-Sea Peoples Dark Age saw the works of the Minoans and Myceneans and thought only Cyclopses could have constructed such structures,² we stare at the achievements of the 19th and early 20th Centuries in near-disbelief.

The moon hasn’t been stepped upon since the 70s. Mars remains uncolonized. Municipal infrastructure like water treatment and provision is falling apart and the government either can’t or won’t respond to natural disasters.³ Whereas we once built beautiful buildings that lasted for centuries, structures such as Chatsworth and the Horse Guards Building of Whitehall, now we have ugly structures of concrete and steel that are falling apart already.⁴

The situation as regards crime and squalor is even worse. As Curtis Yarvin notes in “An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives”:

If you read travel narratives of what is now the Third World from before World War II (I’ve just been enjoying Erna Fergusson’s Guatemala, for example), you simply don’t see anything like the misery, squalor and barbarism that is everywhere today. (Fergusson describes Guatemala City as “clean.” I kid you not.) What you do see is social and political structures, whether native or colonial, that are clearly not American in origin, and that are unacceptable not only by modern American standards but even by 1930s American standards.

So whereas Guatemala was once clean, now America’s cities are towers of concrete surrounded by piles of refuse, mobs of zombie-like drug addicts living on the streets,⁵ and infested with criminals of both the petty and highly violent variety. As Hartley put it, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” More accurately, the past is like a thriving civilization; they do things better there.

In short, we, like those in the Belgian Congo after the Belgians left, live in an “Empire of Dust” where much of what remains is the ruin of a prior civilization destroyed not because it didn’t work, but because the demented ideology of the present conflicted with its continued, functional existence.⁶

What happened? A sort of decolonization inflicted upon the Great Powers themselves - namely America, Germany, Britain, and France - after the outlying colonies had long been destroyed. The decay of law and order, the promotion of anti-white hatred, the decay of infrastructure, and the filling of positions with corrupt thugs rather than honorable gentlemen,⁷ all of it is more or less what happened to the colonies in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Further, it is similar to what happened later on in South Africa, where a collection of communists, leftists, and NGOs with like mindsets and funded by those like George Soros turned a formerly thriving civilization into what now amounts to a land like Mad Max but with more murder.⁸

But while the South Africanization of America is certainly an issue that we face,⁹ it’s not the most accurate comparison to our present problem. South Africa was, when it fell, filled with decades of racial hatred sparked by decades of apartheid that ended only then (though was somewhat overblown), something that Europe never had and nowhere in America has had in over half a century. That unique circumstance created a degree of hatred that was overpowering and, though one with which we largely disagree, understandable. We, then, are somewhat different in terms of where we are and what is happening.

Listen to the audio version of this article, along with some of my extra thoughts on the subject, here:

AUDIO: We're All Rhodesians Now

Our Rhodesian Future

Subversion

In fact, we in the West are more like Rhodesia.¹⁰ We are a highly prosperous society, and that prosperity is broadly distributed, at least to those who intend to work. Further, when not stirred up by agitators, race relations are relatively good; the feeling of the “colorblind 90s,” while obviously not tenable given the ideological forces at play, is a groove in which many were comfortable and which probably represented natural public opinion. Further, we, like the Rhodesians, have a very strong and modern agricultural sector with a focus on exports, though the large industrial part of our economy and our access to the ocean are quite different, as are our natural supplies of oil and demographics.¹¹

Indeed, we in America are like Rhodesia in that we are a free and prosperous society, a republic with strong Anglo traditions,¹² where relations between citizens are, or at least were, good, and the trouble stems from subversion rather than organic feeling; they had Nkomo and Mugabe, we have Soros and his sort.¹³

That is less like apartheid South Africa and much more like Rhodesia, where relations between the blacks and the whites were quite good, which is different than the media surrounding Rhodesia would have you believe.¹⁴ In fact, racial problems in Rhodesia only came when outside communist infiltrators, propped up by their foreign backers, subverted Rhodesia from the inside.

That, indeed, is how Rhodesia fell, as I have discussed before.¹⁵ Though relations inside the country were quite good between black and white and both groups were relatively free and well off, the external world insisted that the government must change from a propertied voting system to unadulterated majority rule. The West demanded as much, and enforced its wishes with an embargo, out of an obsession with “civil rights” in America and egalitarianism in both Europe and America.¹⁶

The communist world did so out of a desire to spread communism and hatred for Rhodesia’s success as a generally white-governed, free state, and enforced its wishes by arming, funding, and training Rhodesia’s terrorist attackers. The result was that Rhodesia, starved of fuel and weapons, fell to the communists in ‘79 and “elected” Mugabe in 1980. Since then the country has seen a Congo-like degradation of infrastructure, mass famine, and infamous hyperinflation. All that was only possible because of external support for internal subversion, of the ability for those who hated the Rhodesian state to batter it down with armies of the worst sort of people.

So, when we stand looking at the ruins of civilization - at the unused Apollo rockets, the crumbling bridges, the schools that resemble zoos more than centers of learning, and the street corners covered in homeless drug addicts - that decay is not natural. Rather, like the “decolonization” that turned the Congo to blood-soaked dust and the former breadbasket of Africa into a starving hellhole, it is the effect of men like Soros, those with no love of America and a desire to watch civilization burn, pouring money into effecting our “decolonization.” This is why he funds soft-on-crime prosecutors,¹⁷ why Kamala called on the left to bail rioters out of jail,¹⁸ why every university and company has DEI commissars,¹⁹ and why Chicago is more dangerous than Iraq during our occupation.

Why is this evil inflicted upon us by the enemies of civilization? Out of spite. Out of a desire to destroy civilization and replace it with the global favela.²⁰

The subverters care not for the lives of those living under the decolonized regime, lives that here as there have gotten immensely worse since the old order was rejected. They care not about the crime, the squalor, the misery.

But they do care about their ideology, one that rejects hierarchy and embraces the favela, viewing such as the ultimate good. Thus, seeing the favela world expand, kept out of their lives by their gates, of course, while inflicted upon the rest of us, is seen as the ultimate good to them. Why? Because it represents the rejection of Western civilization, with its focus on hierarchy and beauty, and the embracement of Third World squalor, which they see as morally superior to civilization.²¹ They want a favela in your backyard, a homeless guy in your library, and criminals in your daughter’s school for the same reason they destroyed Rhodesia and South Africa.

The squalor of Philadelphia’s Kensington or San Francisco’s Tenderloin, though part of what they want and little different from the post-independence Congo, isn’t all that those doing the subversion want. They also want policies that are, unsurprisingly, quite close in form and intent to what Mugabe inflicted upon Rhodesia after its fall.

The Mugabeite Agenda

Mugabe Abroad

Take gun control. As Ian Smith recounts in “The Great Betrayal,” one of the first indignities that Mugabe inflicted upon the white population was confiscating their firearms. The obvious intent was to be more secure in heaping far more, and exceedingly ruinous, indignities upon them. But, as Smith recounts, at first the thugs sent to complete the task were polite, or at least relatively so, as they searched houses, confiscated the tools and heirlooms of Rhodesians in the name of public safety, and left the former owners of such weapons defenseless.

Then came the next part of Rhodesia’s descent into hell. With the whites disarmed, Mugabe’s thugs were free to do more or less as they pleased, which they proceeded to do. They broke onto farms and stole goods, beat and humiliated the inhabitants, and generally caused chaos, all while supported by the regime in doing so.

Next came what Mugabe and his fellows had been wanting all along: land confiscation in the name of “equity.” Before Mugabe’s destruction of Rhodesian agriculture, it was a major exporter of cash crops like tobacco and the bread basket of Africa.²² Then he came along and stole the land of the whites in the name of “equity.” It was “stolen” by the whites, he said, and so it had to be returned to the Africans. So, “taken back” and handed to Africans, generally Mugabe’s thugs, it was.²³ The whites were ruined, as was the farmland, which was no longer farmed properly. Now Zimbabwe is facing recurrent famine instead of being the breadbasket of Africa.²⁴

Importantly, the violent indignities and theft of land inflicted upon the whites were only possible because the population was disarmed, outnumbered, and despised by the “international community” for daring to be white men in black Africa.

Mugabe at Home

Now that America has undergone its own Rhodesia-style subversion, along with a healthy dose of South Africa-style subversion,²⁵ it faces similar problems.

On the South Africa side, as discussed before, there are the obvious and highly relevant issues, among which the biggest two are crime and affirmative action. In South Africa, those two ruinous conditions alone have turned the country into a rotten shell of its former self, and made former jewels of Africa like Durban and Johannesburg deadly to even visit. In America, both the crime and affirmative action requirements are nowhere near South Africa’s level, but are unfortunately trending in that direction.

On the Rhodesian side, the issues are less immediately obvious but are equally problematic once noticed.

On one hand, gun control is an obvious priority of the Democratic Party and RINOs, or together, the Uniparty Establishment. Though gangsters in Chicago and elsewhere get away with owning and using all manner of weapons,²⁶ the Uniparty uses every tragedy to push for disarming law-abiding, responsible citizens. Never are shootings the fault of thugs or loons, always are they the fault of the guns themselves, which must as a result be taken away. Given how little gun control does to stop crime, and how few gun laws seem to be enforced in the cases that matter, gun control of the sort that the Uniparty wants is obviously not about fighting crime, just as it was never about “public safety” in Rhodesia. Rather, it’s about disarming law-abiding, Heritage Americans for what happens next.²⁷

And what is it that will happen next? Like in Rhodesia, humiliating crime and expropriation of the assets owned by the productive sliver of the population.

Kamala Harris and her backers have already made this quite clear. As discussed before, they support an unearned capital gains tax, something that amounts to government confiscation of private property for the purpose of destroying the class which owns that property, much as happened in Britain during the Twentieth Century.²⁸ Simultaneously demanding the confiscation of our wealth and guns, the same sorts are demanding massive subsidies for illegal immigrants and ever-softer-on-crime policies that effectively make murder legal so long as the victim is white²⁹ and theft legal in all cases.

In short, much like in Rhodesia, our Mugabeites are intent on, after disarming us, confiscating our property and showering it upon their supporters, come what may from doing so. Race communism is the appropriate term for this process.³⁰

We’re All Rhodesians Now

So, as the title of this piece says, we’re all Rhodesians now. Our enemies are intent on demolishing the world and arranging what few bricks of it remain in Zimbabwe’s image.

This process is already far advanced in the former colonies, where only a few small bits of civilization remain in secluded spots like Orania,³¹ and the rest has turned to blood and dust.

Now, it is progressing like fast-spreading and potentially terminal cancer within our homelands. The race communist ideal of favela world is dominating our economic edges, as shown by the shantytowns of California’s slums, the violence and decay of cities like Chicago and St. Louis, and the general squalor and crime of every city; even Manhattan and Washington, D.C are, in terms of squalor and filth, more reminiscent of Rio than the London or Paris of 1913.

Simultaneously, the economic and racial grievance of the race communists is eating away at the pillars of our prosperity.

Our immense standard of living and national wealth is the result of the values of America’s founding stock: ordered liberty, a constant push for economic betterment, and the aristocratic sense of, metaphorically, planting trees in the shade of which you will never sit but your grandchildren will.³² That created a low-time preference society that invested in its future prosperity and was relatively free to do so, and we long felt the benefits of those centuries of investment.

Now all of that is being destroyed. As essentially happened in Britain, an unrealized capital gains tax would demolish our invested capital and long-held wealth and traditions by forcing the sale of that which never ought and never would be sold. Even without it, our high income and capital gains taxes, not to mention absurdly high death taxes, have effectively outlawed building wealth of a size that supports self-sovereignty like the aristocrats of Europe’s pre-1880 or so period had, and near-totally outlawed passing such wealth down through the generations.³³

Meanwhile, even as the resultant economic uncertainty causes worry for those who aren’t of the parasitic, welfare-using class, the much bigger and immediate concern is crime. Whether it is some thug murdering your baby as you walk and the government will try to help the shooter,³⁴ similar thugs stomping your son to death and facing no consequences,³⁵ a thug attempting to murder your daughter by stabbing her almost to death and facing no consequences,³⁶ or your friend imprisoned for defending a subway car full of passengers from a thug threatening to kill them,³⁷ crime is a constant threat.

What’s more, it has turned urban life, and indeed even suburban life, into an anarcho-tyrannic hell. On one hand, you cannot defend yourself, as you will be imprisoned for doing so and face ruinous legal fees even if you don’t go to prison. On the other, if you don’t defend yourself, you face losing everything, including your life.

And so we face the same problem as Rhodesians under Mugabe. Defending yourself from regime clients is effectively illegal, and becoming impossible anyway due to gun control. But the cost of not defending yourself is losing your property, seeing your family killed or worse, and potentially losing your life.

Unlike the Rhodesians, however, there is nowhere for us to flee. They had pre-Mandela South Africa, America, and the Commonwealth they could flee to. Where do we have? Europe is similarly hellish. Brazil and Mexico are violent and on the brink of tyrannical hell. Africa is a no-go zone. India and China are somehow worse. Japan, rightly, is skeptical of letting foreigners in. Argentina, El Salvador, and the Caribbean are relatively more pleasant, but face heading our way with just one wrong election.

So we can’t leave. We have to fight. We have to resist the Mugabeites, come what may and with whatever we have, as the Rhodesians did until they gave in in ‘79.

WE HAVE CREATED A LINE OF PRODUCTS, PARTICULARLY MUGS, BASED ON RHODESIA. CHECK OUT OUR “WE’RE ALL RHODESIANS NOW” AND “MAKE ZIMBABWE RHODESIA AGAIN” ITEMS

1. https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/data/UQ_363155/s40110183_phd_final_thesis_copy.pdf

2. See The Glory that Was Greece by Stobart

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson,_Mississippi_water_crisis; https://nypost.com/2024/10/03/us-news/north-carolina-hurricane-victims-slam-biden-harris-admin-as-fema-response-sputters/

4. See, for example, https://www.vintagebuilding.com/houses-longer-houses/

5. See, for example:

6. This is what the phrase “empire of dust” comes from: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2148945/

7.

8.

9. I wrote an article on this for Tablet: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/united-states-south-africa-racial-justice

10.

11. Rhodesia, as a reminder was landlocked. In having access to a continent’s worth of ports, we are extremely different in that respect, as in having a great deal of oil under our ground; they had no domestic oil of note

12.

13.

14. For evidence of this, there were no mass atrocities or killings in Rhodesia, even after Mugabe was in total power. The average black in “Zimbabwe” had been on relatively good terms with the whites before Mugabe, and though land expropriation occurred en masse, generally wasn’t minded to physically harm the whites. Now, whites being welcomed back in loving fashion by their former employees adds more credence to the idea that black-white relations were framed as bad rather than actually being poor.

15.

16. https://x.com/Will_Tanner_1/status/1840749655883153764

17. https://www.heritage.org/crime-and-justice/commentary/george-soross-prosecutors-wage-war-law-and-order

18. https://nypost.com/2024/08/25/opinion/kamala-harris-support-for-bail-fund-that-freed-violent-criminals-shows-how-tough-on-crime-she-really-is/

19.

20. There’s a great deal to say about the “favela world” concept. This article touches on the idea in a helpful way: https://mansworldmag.online/the-populist-moment-never-happened/

21. I expand on this idea here: https://x.com/Will_Tanner_1/status/1841487113620951443

22. https://tessaschlesinger.medium.com/in-the-early-60s-rhodesia-was-known-as-the-breadbasket-of-africa-a6b769b12265

23. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_reform_in_Zimbabwe#Fast-track_land_reform_and_violence

24. https://apnews.com/article/zimbabwe-hunger-food-aid-el-nino-climate-aa25b4d2ee6405a792d75a0d4d12d505; https://www.cfr.org/in-brief/why-zimbabwe-starving

25. https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/united-states-south-africa-racial-justice

26. https://chicago.suntimes.com/2022/10/28/23331107/handguns-switches-sear-extended-capacity-magazines-machine-guns-violence

27. See, for example: https://www.americas1stfreedom.org/content/how-venezuela-s-good-citizens-were-disarmed-is-a-lesson-for-us/

28.

29. I wrote about this here: https://x.com/Will_Tanner_1/status/1841853798395859069

30. I wrote about this here: https://x.com/Will_Tanner_1/status/1816577330891886662

31.

32.

33.

34. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/03/28/investigation-baby-killing/2029325/

35. https://www.cleveland.com/crime/2023/09/jury-finds-akron-brothers-not-guilty-of-involuntary-manslaughter-in-death-of-ethan-liming-during-attack-over-pellet-gun.html

36. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13917413/asu-student-stabbed-classmate-judge-charges-kaci-sloan.html

37. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Jordan_Neely