Why Did Jimmy Carter Side with Communists to Destroy Rhodesia?
Equity Delenda Est
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What makes America’s destruction of Rhodesia so heartwrenching and horrid is that it was a pre-meditated murder.
It wasn’t that our “intelligence community” was in the dark, missing the fact that Ian Smith’s government was fighting an existential conflict against vicious communist rebels. The CIA knew what was going on, and aided the destruction of Rhodesia anyway.1
It wasn’t that the public, the military, or our leaders had no information on the situation. Soldier of Fortune magazine reported on the conflict from the perspective of the Rhodesians in nearly every issue published over the course of the Bush War. American authors like A.J.A. Peck, the author of Rhodesia Accuses, drew attention to the murderous tactics of the blood-drenched rebels, and their communist ideology. Even early media reports on the country honestly reported what was going on.2 And the foreign policy establishment at its highest levels, whether Kissinger3 or presidents,4 admitted they knew Rhodesia was fighting communism and chose to destroy it anyway.
So, America didn’t let Rhodesia die through neglect. Our leaders, alongside their satraps in England, intentionally murdered it, doing so with full knowledge of what they were destroying. They did so because they cared far more about advancing race-communist egalitarianism than about fighting communism.5
This is a fact best seen through the lens of Jimmy Carter, the spineless leftist who decisively and intentionally advanced communism in Africa, primarily by murdering Rhodesia.
Listen to the audio version of this post here:
Carter the Murderer
While Carter is best known for his infamous “malaise” speech,6 the highly destructive inflation seen under his presidency,7 his imbecilic and disastrous detente policy,8 and the Iran hostage disaster,9 it is really the Rhodesian tragedy that I think best characterizes his presidency, for it combines all of his worst qualities that are seen only in pieces in the other matters.
Namely, it shows him to be a coward who was uninterested in addressing reality if reality required doing the difficult thing rather than one popular with the crowd he saw as moral, which is to say the Civil Rights lobby.
Elements of that could be seen throughout his trainwreck of a presidency. Inflation, for example, raged on far longer than it needed to because Carter was unwilling to handle it with due decisiveness;10 it wasn’t until Volker and Reagan broke its back that the inflation crisis ended many years after it began. Similarly, the Iran hostage crisis showed him to be a coward unwilling to use force to achieve noble ends, even if American lives were at risk, a view suggested by his detente policy as well. Notably, the Iranians were scared of Reagan and backed down as soon as he was inaugurated.11 Further, his love of “The Civil Rights Movement” and its objectives, an aspect of his presidency that haunted the Rhodesians, led not just to the solidification of a long-term DEI albatross for America but to an immense spike in crime over his 1977-81 presidency, as shown below.
So, with Carter, America had a president unwilling to fight for American interests if those interests required using his spine and taking a strong stand or contradicting the Soviet-supported Civil Rights grifters.
That led to catastrophe in Rhodesia.
Rhodesia was, as I have described before,12 a highly prosperous land without apartheid that applied the law equally across racial groups. But, because voting required property ownership and whites tended to own property at a higher per-capita rate than blacks,13 Rhodesia was framed as a “racist” state by everyone from the CIA14 to Carter’s friend and UN ambassador, Andy Young.15 As Carter was in thrall to Young and the sort of pro-race communism message he promoted, he continued the US policy of backing the Mugabe and Nkomo-led communist rebels.
This can be seen in Carter’s comments on why he destroyed Rhodesia. For example, when asked why he singled out the Rhodesians for destruction, intentionally destroying their state and aiding Mugabe’s takeover of it, he said:16
“I felt a sense of responsibility and some degree of guilt that we had spent an entire century after the Civil War still persecuting Blacks, and to me the situation in Africa was inseparable from the fact of deprivation or persecution or oppression of Black people in the South.”
Yes, that’s right. He was such a spineless coward that he destroyed a country, handing it to murderous communists,17 because he felt bad about American domestic policies that had ended a decade earlier.
And it’s not just pro-Rhodesia figures like myself who recognize Carter prioritized destroying Rhodesia and devoted special focus and resources to doing so. The National Museum of African American History, eulogizing Carter after he was turned into worm food, noted: “He paid special attention to African affairs and received credit for his leadership in ending white rule in Rhodesia and the creation of an independent Zimbabwe.”18
Similarly, Carter himself admitted he focused especially on Rhodesia rather than on solving more pressing problems. For example, in an interview for a book years later, comments admitted by the US embassy in Zimbabwe,19 he admitted, “I spent more effort and worry on Rhodesia than I did on the Middle East.”20 That is an astounding admission. At a time when Iran was holding Americans hostage and an oil crisis caused in part by his Middle East policies was wracking America,21 severely driving up costs for ordinary Americans, the president was more focused on destroying a prosperous little country in Africa on behalf of communists than on fixing the fuel crisis he helped create or saving the Americans held hostage! And not only that, but he proudly admits it!
What’s more, he did so knowing that he was choosing to fight “racism” rather than communism. As that aforementioned book’s author notes, based on interviews with Carter:22
Why? Because the essence of American foreign policy during the Cold War—stopping Soviet expansion—slammed up against the most raw and explosive aspect of American domestic politics: racism. The war in Rhodesia was not just a bitter liberation struggle; it was also a conflict that pitted a white minority regime against the oppressed black majority. Opposing the Cubans in Rhodesia would mean supporting the white racist government.
So, the decision to destroy Rhodesia and hand it to communists that created famine conditions a few short years later23 was done knowingly, and because of the phantom menace of “racism.”
Andy Young the Co-Conspirator
Predictably, Carter’s friend Andy Young was involved in that, demanding American foreign policy be informed by the civil rights movement. As the same author notes:24
Young briefed Carter on southern African issues: “I said that basically it boils down to ‘one man, one vote.’ And . . . he [Carter] said, ‘Well, that’s not much different from what we had to go through.’ I said, ‘No—well, it’s the same problem, but there are probably lots of differences but it boils down to the same issue.’” Not only was the fundamental issue analogous, but the protagonists were, too: “Some people say that people are not the same, but they are,” Young told the Nation of Islam paper, Bilalian News. “I know Ian Smith and [South African prime minister] John Vorster. I learned about such men at my mother’s knee.” Vice President Walter Mondale summed it up: “The analogy with the civil rights movement informed everything we did in southern Africa.”
In other words, because Ian Smith and the Rhodesians rejected the doctrine of egalitarianism,25 Carter chose, at the behest of Andy Young, to destroy them. Young, admitting as much yet again, said, “He knows very clearly the evils and dangers of racism, and he also knows that racists can change.”26
And, as the book’s author notes, that hatred of “racism” meant Carter was willing to overlook communism:27
Viewing the struggle from this perspective enabled Carter to look beyond the communist rhetoric of the black leaders fighting against the racist Rhodesian government and acknowledge that they, like the civil rights activists in the US South, were fighting for basic human rights.
There are countless other quotes from Carter, Young, and the historians who have examined their policy in the years since they enabled white genocide in Southern Africa.28 Repeating them would be tedious, so I won’t do it, as the central lesson has been shown: Carter knew Rhodesia was a free and stable bulwark against communism, yet chose to knowingly aid communist rebels and destroy it anyway because he was worried about “racism” more than communism or country-scale disaster.
That is a telling summation of the man’s virtue, or more accurately lack thereof. Further, it shows what his presidency, and indeed American policy throughout that sorry chapter of the Cold War, was about.
We weren’t fighting communism. At least, we weren’t doing so if that fight would mean aiding “racist” colonial governments,29 however successful those governments might have been at creating better conditions for all under their rule. Before Carter destroyed it, after all, Rhodesia had the highest living standards for blacks in the continent.
Rather, we were fighting for egalitarianism. Americans suffered oil shocks, inflation, and crime waves that ruined entire cities because Jimmy Carter was a buffoon goaded by other buffoons into focusing on the supposed “racism” of a small, anti-communist country in Southern Africa rather than on fixing the country he supposedly led.
And the wages of that evil?
Death, as always. Communism triumphed and soon South Africa fell as well. Rhodesia, meanwhile, saw first a genocide of the Ndebele effected by Mugabe’s CCP-trained troops, then confiscation of white property, and then famine and hyperinflation.30
A prosperous and free country was knowingly sacrificed on the altar of “anti-racism.” That is Jimmy Carter’s legacy.
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Featured image credit: By TSGT James F. Clawson - DefenseImagery.mil, VIRIN DF-SC-84-10031, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6105938
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Worthless President such pain was caused by him in so many places and he hid it under Christianity which is even more despicable
Yet another CIA assassination of a civilization. The CIA needs to be disbanded and it's agents thrown to the wind.
But then, most CIA personnel are communists, just like the ATF and FBI