Samizdata

Fear and self-loathing in Johannesburg.

This deeply concerned man was going about his usual business of saving the poor and oppressed of the Earth when one them mugged him. His response?

“He had not laid a charge because he believed the muggers were the very people who needed to be helped by the summit”.

To more or less complete indifference by the so called human rights champions of the left, Robert Mugabe continues the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of white farmers and brutal murders of black political opponents in Zimbabwe.

Insignificant sanctions have not saved a single life from Mugabe’s thugs nor prevented the theft of land than is leading inexorably to mass starvation in that unhappy country.

Yet it is no more a ‘political’ question that dealing with a marauding wolf attacking one’s sheep is. Commentators should not be calling for ‘harder sanctions’ or ‘robust diplomacy’ but rather for the violent overthrow of Mugabe. There is no material difference between the Mugabe’s and Saddam Hussain’s of this world and the more murderous Mafia families of Corleone in Sicily and you don’t see the Italian state negotiating with Mafia dons but rather sending para-military police with guns after them.

There is only one reasonable way to deal with murderous tyrants and that is to kill them. As I have said before, until someone puts a bullet through Mugabe’s head and that of any who would emulate him, Zimbabwe will continue its spiral towards complete societal meltdown. The ‘heads’ of all such governments belong on pikes in a public square and any government who has civil dealing with such people are part of the problem. The world is awash with morally ambiguous issues but this is not one of them. Sic semper tyrannis.

Todays newspapers give us two contrasting images. Thabo Mbeki, South Africa’s ANC leader smiling as he poses with his friend Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s ZANU-PF leader, sticking by him in the face of world wide (but not African) criticism of Zimbabwe’s descent into collective nihilism.

 

It also gives us a picture of the dead body of Zimbabwean farmer Terry Ford, murdered by Mugabe’s ZANU-PF thugs. It shows his distressed Jack Russell terrier, Squeak, who lay curled up next to his dead friend, refusing to leave his side.

And so now we read that Commonwealth Leaders meeting in London today will delay their ‘verdict’ on the farcical ‘elections’ in Zimbabwe and whether to suspend that country from the Commonwealth, a trivial matter of suspending a murderous tyrant from a trivial organization.

Yet clearly if the Commonwealth is serious about democracy then surely nations with governments which do not adhere to the social values of the majority of the Commonwealth must be expelled.

Therefore, I call on the Commonwealth’s leadership to expel The United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and India forthwith as being grossly unrepresentative of the murderous kleptocratic regimes which characterize the majority of the Commonwealth.

Next time they want a Foreign Aid hand out, let the murdering sons of bitches ask their good friend Thabo Mbeki for South African taxpayers money.

Update: Kill white landowners, kill black political opponents, destroy a nation’s economy and plunge it into a nightmare and what happens? Does the Commonwealth demand the overthrow of the tyrant and his government? No. Does the Commonwealth demand Zimbabwe’s expulsion whilst ZANU-PF remains in power? No. The Commonwealth has in fact decided to suspend Zimbabwe for one year. Read that again. ONE YEAR. The fact even this pathetic gesture has been so long coming is an indictment of the moral bankruptcy of the Commonwealth as an institution.

John Howard, the Australian Prime Minister stressed: “The committee expressed its determination to promote reconciliation in Zimbabwe between the main political parties.”

Reconciliation? Mugabe is a tyrant and murderer and any rational society should be urging that he be summarily put up against a wall, shot and then thrown in a garbage dump, not ‘reconciled’ with. Well I guess we should look on the bright side: things will not be so violent in Zimbabwe one year from now as all Mugabe’s opponents will either be dead or Mugabe will be hanging on the meat hook that he deserves by then.

USS Clueless gives a series of baffling remarks about Somalia. As far as I can figure, Steven seems to think the USA was the primary aggrieved party in 1993 when it tried to carry out the UN’s behest and help impose a central government on Somalia at gunpoint. Forget the daft movie, read the excellent book for a more balanced view.

So if the Somali government is now to be the next target, where exactly is this ‘Somali’ government? Exactly why is Somalia about to be attacked and in what manner? Somalia does not have an army like the Taliban did, it is just a heavily armed society. Does the US attack everyone with a gun? Well, that is pretty much everyone. I expect they will tend to shoot back unless a great deal of political finesse is used.

Unqualified Offerings wrote an article a while ago pointing out why the UN/US actions pretty much guaranteed a fight with the so called ‘warlords’ in Somalia. I have always thought this part of his analysis was spot on

No, the racism of the Somali intervention had more to do with the familiar liberal/left “soft racism of low expectations.” Because the reason some Somalis were starving was that other Somalis, with guns, wanted them to starve. Starvation was a weapon of war. “Warlords” were the root cause of starvation, and starvation was a means to an end, and that end was power. “Warlords” are nothing more nor less than politicians; if the claim offend thee, call them “politicians of a type.” By making it its business to “prevent starvation” the Bush administration put itself in the business of thwarting warlord ambitions. That’s not the racist part. The racist part is that, as was clear at the time, the idea that the warlords would take exception to this took the US government, media and public completely by surprise. Then the US announced its plan to disarm the warlords, which is to say, turn them into non-warlords, which is to say, vitiate their claims to power. Again, it wasn’t racist to try to disarm the warlords as such. But one could only imagine the warlords not objecting to this, and violently, if one somehow couldn’t imagine that these swarthy foreigners took themselves and their own ambitions seriously. One had to believe either that the warlords were attempting to shoot and starve their enemies into submission by mistake, and would be grateful when shown the error of their ways, or that they had made the decision to try to shoot and starve their way to power lightly, and that once US attention turned like the gaze of a stern yet kindly parent upon these errant children, they would cast their little eyes down, mutter “Sorry, mom,” and go play right. In US perceptions, the warlords could have been idiots, children or cowards. What US policy could not have been based on was a sober appreciation that the US was setting itself against serious, adult power brokers who cared more for their own plans than American ones.

Yes indeed. This may have come as a shock, but folks do tend to act in what they think are their own interests, even black folks in Africa. How about that?