Why Rhodesia Matters
How'd We End Up Here
It is difficult to overstate the degree to which the West has changed in the wake of the world wars. It was once a land of both law and order and brilliant adventurers. In other words, William Blackstone’s common law and Justice Marshall’s rulings were as much a part of the West as the at-seas exploits of Sir Francis Drake or the frontier adventures of Davy Crockett and Kit Carson.
What that created was a world where the cities were safe and the wide world open for exploration. A Victorian hero could walk the streets of London or Lima in the night and not fear robbery, then, like Courtney Selous or Cecil Rhodes, ship off to the Heart of Darkness to bring order out of chaos and explore the frontier.
Once those great adventurers arrived at the areas once labeled “here be monsters” by medieval mapmakers, they didn’t suffer under the delusion that their cultures should be subsumed by those of the lands they found. Rather, when they came across nightmarish horrors, such as mass sacrifice in Mexico and Dahomey, they destroyed them: rather than accept such horrors as normal and “cultural uniqueness,” great men like Cortes and Napier put a stop to it.
For example, Charles Napier, when ruling the British Raj, was told that sati, the native practice of burning widows to death, was a local tradition. Instead of bowing to tht, he said, “Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.”
But then came the bloodbath of World War I, which drained the West of its vitality, and the massive destruction of World War II demolished the residual structures that had supported that civilization.
Now we live in a wholly different world from what used to exist. America continues to descend down the South African-style path of anarcho-tyranny,1 and, as it does so, the videos and stories that emerge are increasingly disturbing. Illegal immigrants have overwhelmed the Texas National Guard and stormed through the border in scenes seemingly out of Rome’s Decline and Fall.2 “Squatters” are given more rights than landowners in blue states and allowed to take over homes at will, with the homeowners arrested if they protest that sorry state of affairs.3 Shootings, stabbings, and robberies routinely happen on subways, and people cower rather than fight back. Protesters screeching about conflicts abroad deface American monuments and light Old Glory on fire.4
To see why this is happening, we must look to Rhodesia and the Rhodesian experience: subversion and conquest at the hands of weak-kneed Westerners and communist terrorists. To do so, this article will first examine the history of Rhodesia and the changed social conditions in the West that led to a war on hierarchy, and will then examine how that led to the Great Betrayal of Rhodesia and why it matters to modern Americans.
Check out the podcast version of this article here:
The Rhodesian Lesson
But not everywhere lost its spirit in the way the West did after the disastrous first half of the 20th Century. Southern Rhodesia, the little land north of the Limpopo and south of the Zambezi, resisted the spirit sweeping the world in the mid-1960s and decided to fight back with everything it had instead of going along with the gradual communist destruction of everything we once held dear.5
The History of Rhodesia
Rhodesia, for those who don’t know, was the creation of famed explorer and hunter Courtney Selous and the British colonial titan, Cecil Rhodes. Unlike South Africa, which was mainly peopled by Boers and known for its mining, Rhodesia was an Anglo country whose residents were, thanks to their devotion to British customs, known as “more British than the British”6 and mainly devoted their efforts to farming cash crops on vast estates in the sparsely settled lands.
So, though the country was small and landlocked, it became a powerhouse. It was, before the Bush War began, an industrializing island of prosperity in the Dark Continent, and was so agriculturally competent that it was known as the Breadbasket of Africa.7
Further, in what was a continent of ethnic hostility, whether of the Rwandan mold, Congolese mold, or South African apartheid mold, Rhodesia resisted that impulse. Instead of one group dominating the others in an unfair, tyrannical system, Rhodesia was a landed republic of the pre-Reform British and early American type, where anyone could vote, black or white, who had the requisite amount of property that showed them to be responsible and productive, and so trustworthy enough to have a hand in running the state.8 Things changed somewhat in the post-1969 era,9 though, as Prime Minister Ian Smith made clear in his memoir, “The Great Betrayal,” the goal of the changes was to create conditions that would develop into a responsible partnership between black and white Rhodesians, not for one group to oppress the other. Black Rhodesians seem largely to have accepted that, as the Rhodesian African Rifles units remained full of high-morale volunteers eager to defend their state and villages from communist aggression.10
But despite Rhodesia’s economic success, resistance to communism, and effective steps toward charting a course in Africa where the whites wouldn't face the fate of those left behind in Congo or Kenya and where blacks wouldn't face the same fate as in South Africa, America helped the USSR destroy the brave little land.11 It did so, as we have covered before, by working with the UK to embargo Rhodesia while encouraging the USSR and Red China’s efforts to aid the anti-Rhodesian rebels.12
Though Rhodesians, black and white, put up a valiant fight, the combined weight of the world’s efforts to destroy them proved too much. They ran out of fuel, were starved for arms and ammunition, were close to running out of men, and, after Angola and Mozambique fell to the communists, were beset on all sides but south by enemies and infiltrators.
Mugabe quickly took power and proceeded to first genocide opposing tribes, the Ndebele and Kalanga peoples, and then nationalize the white-owned farmland,13 carrying out many atrocities against and heaping many indignities upon the white population in the process.14 Now, far from being an economic powerhouse and the breadbasket of Africa, Zimbabwe has seen hyperinflation15 and famine.16
The Story of Rhodesia and the Related War on Hierarchy
The question that must be answered to understand why the West faces the fate it now does is this: why destroy an agricultural land that mimicked Britain at its Victorian height?17 Rhodesia wasn’t a fascist state, nor a communist satrapy of the Soviets, nor even unstable and in need of help. It was, instead, a prosperous and free country that resembled hierarchical, pre-1914 Britain.18 Large estates, great hunting, and prosperity for all were its defining features.19 Those features had always been what the West ostensibly wanted, so why destroy it?
The answer is that Cultural Marxism and liberalism had, over the course of the Twentieth Century, rotted the West from the inside. It was, as shown by its retreat from imperialism and drift toward socialism, no longer comfortable with itself and its old values, and so wanted to destroy them. Particularly, the degenerated West wanted to destroy the twin concepts of natural hierarchy and cultural achievement. To explain what they wanted to destroy in Rhodesia and why, we first have to examine how hierarchy and cultural achievement defined the pre-1914 West.
Hierarchy and Achievement
As a reminder, the Old World, and much of the New World, namely South America and the Cavalier South were ruled by hierarchy:20 landed aristocrats, whether titled or gentry, handed down their wealth and prestige from generation to generation.21
At the top of the hierarchy were the monarchs. Below them was the peerage, or aristocracy, which had its own internal hierarchy: dukes, marquesses, earls, viscounts, and barons. Then came the gentry, which also had its own hierarchy: baronets (a hereditary title but not part of the peerage), knights, esquires, and gentlemen. Below them was everyone else, with the middle class entitled to some respect but not much. Yeomen farmers and large tenant farmers were typically allowed to vote and had similar interests to the peerage and gentry, but no one doffed their hat at a tenant farmer. At the bottom of the social pyramid were the agricultural laborers and industrial workers.
The hereditary nature of wealth and the responsibilities that were thus attached to it22 meant that wealth was largely controlled by an elite few. Those few were the ones who, largely, were the ones best suited to responsibly nurture it in the manner of a garden.
Amongst those responsibilities that came with wealth was noblesse oblige, or the concept that the privileged should care for their social inferiors in the name of the community. But, unlike the do-gooder impulse of today,23 noblesse oblige was not meant to destroy all wealth in the impossible quest to eradicate poverty; Jesus reminded us that the poor with always be with us, after all.24 Nor was noblesse obliged the detached philanthropy of our day. Rather, donated wealth was responsibly spent in a hands-on way to better the circumstances of the poor, such as by building worker cottages, as the Duke of Bedford did.25
But all wealth wasn’t given away. Much of it was spent on great cultural achievements. In Europe, this meant wealth was spent on things like the great statues of the Renaissance and “Grand Tour” England.26 Or it was spent on the beautiful Palladian country houses of England27 and the hunting castles of Scotland.28 Or the music of Mozart and Beethoven.
Importantly, all that came only as a result of noble wealth; hierarchy enabled cultural achievement. All the great things we now look on with admiration, from Notre Dame to Chatsworth in architecture, Florentine statuary29 and the Veiled Vestal Virgin in art,30 all was only possible because wealth was in the hands of a few who thought about building things that would last for centuries.31
The War on Hierarchy
But then, when the world was at its height of such cultural achievement, onto the global scene came Marxism and Leninism, the twin ideas of enforced egalitarianism and weaponized grievance. The destruction of the West came as a result, even in nations that dodged the communist bullet. Death duties, punitive income taxation, social leveling, and hostility to beauty, resulted from those impulses, destroying much of the Old World mindset.
This era, roughly the two or three decades after WWII, saw horrifying policies in the name of egalitarianism. It saw the nationalized British coal industry destroy Wentworth Woodhouse,32 the greatest of country houses, out of envy. It saw America destroy the space program to focus on welfare.33 And, perhaps worst of all, it saw former empires turn on their colonial subjects.
At home, the war on hierarchy meant punitive taxation meant to destroy the old hierarchical structures.
In Britain, for example, chaos and dishonor came with the post-WWII Socialist government of Attlee. Though termed “a sheep in sheep’s clothing” by Churchill, Attlee was anything but to the Britain he radically transformed for the worse. He shredded the glory of the Empire, nationalized industry, and built the cradle-to-grave Welfare State. That socialist Britain, the one built by Attlee, is far different than the free and prosperous Britain of her Victorian heydays. It’s overregulated, burdened by high taxes, a shadow of the empire on which the sun once never set, and so anti-free speech and anti-Christian as to arrest those praying outside of abortion clinics.34
Such economic and social changes are hard, near-impossible overstate: the Britain of 1913 and the Britain of 1946 are completely different.35 In the former, liberty, hierarchy, and prosperity were the rule. In the latter, the once-prosperous and well-fed land was dominated by rationing, socialism, nationalized industry, and a great leveling effected by high taxes and free trade that wiped away the old lords.36
Much the same was true of America. Though not quite as bad as Britain, the taxes we now pay are lower thanks to Trump, but still so high that the Founders would already be shooting.37 They were even higher in the aftermath of WWII.38 Further, that era saw the creation and solidification of the Executive Branch agencies and their onerous regulations. Those taxes and regulations have immensely burdened small businesses and family farms, destroying America’s yeomen population and forcing it under the yoke of corporate employment.39
Meanwhile, the same impulse played out abroad. Hatred of hierarchy meant hatred of colonialism and imperialism, after all, so the former colonial powers effectively helped communists carry out atrocities in Algeria, Kenya, the Congo, and more as they left and helped the "national governments" accede to power.
Take, for example, the Belgian Congo. The atrocities of which the Belgians were accused were nearly entirely made up,40 and the Belgians turned it into the pearl of Africa. But the Belgians were forced out by liberal Western opinion regardless, and what was once the pearl of Africa has now devolved into a land of endless civil war. The same is true across the post-colonial world. In Rwanda and Zimbabwe, once the “oppressors” were gone, the locals engaged in genocides of their own.41 Vietnam saw decades of war, the Khmer Rouge killed a quarter of its own population,42 Algeria has been a relative wreck since the French left, and India and Pakistan are at the brink of nuclear war43 after fighting in the wake of independence that saw millions dead.44
All of that came because the ruling regimes in the West and the communist world had fully imbibed the hatred of hierarchy that comes with Marxism and Leninism. They saw society as democratic and so needed to be leveled by economic and violent means. In Europe and America, this meant punitive taxation and regulation. In the post-colonial world, it meant violent chaos as European administrators left and native thugs waged wars on their tribal and European enemies. Society was indeed leveled, at great cost.
Rhodesia Resists the War on Hierarchy
Rhodesia, meanwhile, saw what happened in the Congo, Kenya, and elsewhere and decided it would resist such horrors. Leading it at the time was WWII Spitfire pilot and war hero Ian Smith. Under his aegis, Rhodesia declared independence in the hope of surviving as a functional nation.
The now-anti-hierarchy West was infuriated by Rhodesia’s decision to resist degradation rather than submit to chaos. So, the UK, and eventually America under Jimmy Carter and his friends like Andy Young, embargoed Rhodesia.45 It couldn't import fuel or weapons and so was slowly strangled by the West as communists funded and armed by the USSR and Red China murdered civilians in horrible ways as their form of "war."46
Eventually, Rhodesia fell, unable to survive without being able to import fuel or weapons and unable to export its cash crops. It was then the aforementioned horrors of Mugabe occurred,47 with the West covering for Mugabe and even congratulating him as he butchered his own people and expropriated their property.48
Why Rhodesia Matters: The Lessons to Be Learned
The story of Rhodesia matters largely because its destruction occurred at the hands of Western powers, by dishonorable means, for abominable reasons. As Ian Smith put it in “The Great Betrayal”:
“But most important, and above all else, was the treatment to which we had been subjected: the breaches of agreements, the double standards, the blatant deception and blackmail with which we were confronted. To put it crudely, we had had an absolute bellyful. Rhodesians simply wished to be left to lead their own lives. And in all honesty it had to be admitted that the Conservatives were as much to blame as Labour.”
That conduct matters, as it's largely the reason the West is no longer functional and, indeed, often abetting its own destruction by importing hordes of foreigners. It shows that the land once populated by those of Napier’s stern spine is no longer self-confident and, as such, no longer willing to stand for the traits that made it great.
Egalitarianism did not make the West great. Social welfare did not make the West great. Hatred of white people did not make the West great. Degenerate culture and rotten entertainment did not make the West great. Social hierarchy and its wonderful fruits did.
It was Rhodesia, an outpost of English civilization in Africa regarded as “more British than the British,” that last held onto the old values. In fact, the country was considered so much like the old English civilization in the home country, if not more like the England of its glory days than the England of the present, that the Duke of Montrose moved to Rhodesia and dedicated his services to Ian Smith’s government.49 Further, it had been loyal to England and Western values. Rhodesia fought and paid dearly for its English reputation, contributing heavily to the WW2 war effort.50 Prime Minister Ian Smith, who tirelessly led it from the Unilateral Declaration of Independence to its fall in 1980, after years of warfare, was a heroic Spitfire pilot in WW2.
The war then, in which America sided with the communists, was not about “freedom and democracy”. Both died an immediate death upon Mugabe’s accession to power. It was instead a war about values on which the Rhodesian side stood for hierarchy, achievement, and men of old, men like Napier.
But, as shown by its rejection of Rhodesia, the West turned its back on those values. Rotted internally by Cultural Marxism and the Leninist grievance impulse, it destroyed them out of a dark desire to tear down what had previously been its driving impulse. Sadly, it succeeded in tearing those values down, and when Rhodesia died in 1980, they became dead and buried.
Now, we have a world the great men of the past would find abhorrent. Instead of moon landings, concertos, and country palaces, we have brutalist architecture, rap music, and heavily abused food stamp programs. Further, we have a rise in concern for “equity” and “social justice,” the ideas that all outcomes should be the same and that any tactic is justifiable in reaching that goal.51 That “equity” mindset is the same, at its core, as the anti-hierarchy impulse that tore down the imperial world and Rhodesia.
Was that a good tradeoff? Was it worth it? Or should we have sided with Rhodesia as it remained the last outpost of the Old World, beset by grievance politics of the sort now destroying us?
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Fantastic article
“…the creation and solidification of the Executive Branch agencies and their onerous regulations. Those taxes and regulations have immensely burdened small businesses and family farms, destroying America’s yeomen population and forcing it under the yoke of corporate employment.” 💯