On the Western intervention in Zimbabwe point, it’s probably a no-win situation in the end.
If there isn’t external intervention, the misery continues for people on the wrong side of the regime, black and white.
If there is external intervention sanctioned by the West, with or without the UN, it will be labelled as a form of Western neo-colonialism by Mugabe and quite possibly by other black African leaders who will assert that black African nations are not accorded the same status and sovereignty by Western nations as Western nations accord each other.
Why shouldn’t the West just take its lead from the black African nations, most of which have not been critical of Mugabe’s human rights abuses (and most of which by Western standards aren’t in a position to claim moral superiority in that area)? If that’s the way black Africa wants to behave, why should we intervene and impose our Western values and demands upon them?
Particularly as it was the West which brought Mugabe to power because Britain, the former Rhodesian colonial power, and America refused to recognise the popularly elected Muzorewa government in 1979 and encouraged fresh elections to allow the communist revolutionaries to stand. Mugabe duly won those, after typical intimidation of the electorate, and then duly set about consolidating his power by removing rivals; mass slaughter of ethnic enemies; and buggering his country with spectacular success for the past three decades. Or are we going to do a Saddam Hussein on him and decide we’ll get rid of our former pet despot who makes Ian Smith’s despised colonial regime look like Mother Teresa and her nuns?
It may be politically incorrect to say it, but the fact is that since they achieved black rule most African nations have been run by a disgusting bunch of thugs and crooks, from Idi Amin to Daniel Moi to Robert Mugabe and sundry others, most of whom were popularly ‘elected’ with some exceptions like Emperor Bokassa, another strutting but murderous clown in the Idi Amin mould. Black Africa’s current poor conditions owe a lot more to its never ending crop of corrupt leaders than to colonialism.
But if even attempts to stem corruption in Africa are a form of neo-colonialism by the West http://www.mngt.waikato.ac.nz/ejrot/cmsconference/2005/proceedings/postcolonialism/DeMaria.pdf , isn’t intervening in Zimbabwe to make it conform to Western standards just another form of arrogant Western neo-colonialism, which after all is said to be the original source of the current problems? Won’t it just become another plank in the arguments that Western interference in black Africa is, despite abundant evidence to the contrary, the source of all black Africa’s problems?
Damned if we do, damned if we don’t.
I think it would be a lot easier to justify intervention if we said: Bastards like Mugabe are not the product of colonialism or anything apart from their own lust for power and money. They are an affront to human rights and a menace to their people and nation. It is morally justifiable to stop them doing more harm. The only way to stop these mongrels cropping up with monotonous regularity is to make it clear that their conduct will not be tolerated and that effective consequences will follow stepping off the path of righteousness.
But even if we take that approach, does the West have the resources or stomach for taking on most of black Africa for the next few decades? And won’t that, in the end, just be something like another form of colonialism?
How many South African or British soldiers would it take to unseat the junta and disperse the Zanu (PF) “veterans”, who are now veterans only of whipping and gouging defenceless people, or raping women without the slightest chance of resistance?
Pass a really terribly enormously serious UN resolution, assuming the required votes can be obtained? That won’t have any effect.
Economic sanctions? That won’t hurt Mugabe and his crew, just the people who are already suffering.
What if Nigeria, the biggest oil producer in Africa and the eleventh largest in the world, decides it doesn’t like that direction because of the ultimate implications for Nigerian sovereignty if it offends the West, so then it says it won’t supply any more oil to sanctioning countries or their corporations if sanctions are imposed? Who’s going to blink first when the world is desperate for oil?
UN military intervention? What’s the chances of that with, among other things, China sucking up to black Africa for resources?
So some nation goes it alone or in an alliance with others. Which nation(s) will that be, that isn’t / aren’t already extended or overextended by Iraq, Afghanistan and other commitments much closer to their national interests?
The best thing that could happen for the people of Zimbabwe would be for massive oil reserves to be found there, then the West would be interested in helping them.
I’m all in favour of getting rid of despots like Mugabe, but experience shows that they’ll probably be replaced by something similar unless there is a prolonged external intervention, which I don’t think any nation is prepared to undertake.
Its present situation is simply a consequence of the fact that Mugabe and Co are greedy, ruthless, murderous bastards who will do whatever they have to do to stay in power. In Zimbabwe, black Africans are fully responsible for every misery black Africans, and the remaining whites, are suffering and colonialism is utterly irrelevant to the present black despotism.
If that is so, then why have African leaders been so reluctant to intervene?
Why is it that most African leaders (in power) seem to be of a similar caste as Mugabe?
What influenced them to become that way?
In answer to your question, yes I would fight for my freedom as a black in white run Zimbabwe but I’m not sure I’d try it in black run Zimbabwe because those bastards are more brutal and would just as likely kill my family in retaliation.
My question wasn’t restricted to Zimbabwe, as I was responding to the accusation that Mandela was a criminal etc. above, so it applies to anyone anywhere, including N.I.
As for South Africa, it’s always assumed that it was a land of sweetness and light before the whites arrived. The fact is that what became the dominant elements of the Zulus were a greedy and aggressive bunch of brutal warmongers carving out a kingdom by force in far more violent ways than the whites subsequently did. When people go back into the past to point to the evils of white colonialism as the cause of current problems, why don’t they continue the process and identify the features in pre-white Zulu expansion and wars which might equally be said to have descended down the generations to cause modern problems? If that process is said to be irrelevant to the current situation, then why is it logical arbitrarily to focus only on white involvement immediately following and for a time contemporaneous with what the Zulus were doing?
The Zulus were of what we might describe as a medieval culture, if comparing it to European standards, like with like. Much of the same was done in and around Europe during the medieval era.
What were American and European tradesmen doing exporting an estimated twenty million slaves from Africa?
What were the British doing by destroying the Zulu nation?
What were Cecil Rhodes and his cronies doing when they destroyed the Ndebele?
I think there is too much of a willingness for well-intentioned people to find excuses in history to excuse bad conduct by people whose bad conduct is more probably influenced by other and more recent issues, such as poverty and lack of education and unemployment and the predictable social consequences of such problems, combined with the failures of governments now run by their own people after liberating themselves from white rule.
That’s very patronising, R.S.
It is certainly not my intention to excuse anybodys bad conduct. What I am saying is that Africa is a complete and utter mess and it is the interference of Europeans in the first instance and others that have joined them in more recnt times, that created and perpetuate this mess for their own gain.
The history is one of servitude, poor education and poverty - that’s precisely my point!
I have a friend who was raised in white, colonial Kenya, and later moved to South Africa. Early in his adult life he fought alongside Mike Oare in the Congo.
We were having a lunch pub one day, when he commented on the food that was served to the natives on the tea plantation. He referred to it as ‘Boy Food’. This was the offle and other parts of the animal which we might feed our dogs. He said that they quite liked it.
‘Of course they quite liked it,’ says I, ‘it’s all they know and they probably disguised it with seasoning. They would have probably have quite liked the better cuts even more.’ But it wasn’t so much the food they were given which pissed me off. It was the term ‘Boy Food’. To me at that time, it summed up all that was corrupt with the colonial masters.
He and I remain friends, but we have our differences.
I read some that opposition members were carrying out acts of armed resistance and were now fighting back (mainly against the secret police and squatter thugs) causing much chagrin in the gov’t; since calling out the Army might be just as dangerous to them as it would be to the populace…
I take ‘caste’ to mean of a similar type, not in the Indian sense of social stratification as African leaders come from many different ethnic, tribal and clan backgrounds.
If so, it’s because they’re politicians who, by nature, are ambitious and addicted to the exercise of power and its trappings and in many cases always willing to sell down their own people (just like whites in developed countries whether at the lower levels of trade unions or municipal councils or the higher levels of government). It’s worse in Africa and some other places because they don’t have structures and communities which restrain their excesses, which is just a matter of political and social development. The rotten boroughs in England aren’t that far in the past as an example of a European political and social stage which allowed what we now regard as political corruption because England had yet to mature to its present stage. Nor are the French and Russian revolutions and the First and Second World Wars as examples of the glorious maturity of European and other Western powers compared with the supposed savages in Africa. It’s just that, apart from Yugoslavia and spot fires like the Basques and Northern Ireland, Northern Europe has been unusually free of wars for the past sixty plus years so the butchery and so in Africa (and not all in black Africa as Algeria among other places showed) looks bad because it’s happening against a blank canvas, unlike being contrasted with the Eastern front or the Holocaust during WWII.
How long did it take Europe to progress from the medieval era?
Why do we expect people from virtually stone age cultures and societies like Australian aborigines or New Guinea to adapt in a generation or two to Western democracies and societies which took thousands of years of painful evolution to adapt to their own cultural, social, political and economic circumstances, while still managing to institutionalise violence as a way of dealing with things they don’t like?
Because, according to well meaning (and I’m using that as a term to describe people of genuine good intentions and not as a patronising or condescending term) people of various political and social outlooks and beliefs, all men and especially all women are created equal AND are equal. I don’t have a problem with the created part, but a walk down any city street in any country tells you that not everybody is equal, for a whole host of social, economic, health and other reasons.
Look at the violence and child sex abuse and rapes and murders in remote Aboriginal communities here which operate on some awful Hobbesian mix of bastardised traditional culture free of traditional restraints with added lashings of alcohol and pornographic videos and no schooling and no jobs and tell me that the children growing up in those communities are equal in any sense to most of the rest of Australia and that they will grow up to be equal as adults to the rest of us. http://www.hreoc.gov.au/social_Justice/sj_report/sjreport07/chap3.html So that a ten year old Aboriginal girl can be pack raped without her many attackers being dealt with in the same way they would if it was a white girl, because special considerations are applied to Aboriginal offenders. The following link is by a dedicated arch-conservative who usually gives me the shits in spades, but as on a few occasions when almost everyone agrees with him it’s hard to disagree with much of what he says. http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,22909220-25717,00.html
Or look at the rascals in New Guinea. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/sep/22/population.davidfickling
It’s unpalatable to those who want to maintain the cosy fiction of the noble savage and the equality of all men, but people who are allowed to preserve medieval or earlier and more primitive cultures often do not fit into modern Western societies and do not operate on the same basis as most people in those societies.
That, in my view, is the case in much of Africa, sub Saharan and elsewhere if for different reasons. Including Mr bin Laden and his medieval adherents, although they do rather like modern aeroplanes, weapons and means of communications (the latter being anathema to strict Muslims who never depicted living beings, which is why all the classical mosques and decorations including the Moorish ones in Spain used geometric and other patterns, but apparently Mr bin Laden got a special dispensation from Mohammed PBHN to use still and moving pictures of Mr bin Laden in pursuit of whatever it was he was pursuing and has yet to tell the world it was that he was trying to achieve by flying planes into buildings and killing a few thousand innocent people for no known reason.)
The question is, why do they have to conform to Western standards?
What makes Western society superior to theirs, outside Western eyes?
How would we feel if Angola had the power of America and imposed its standards on us?
Isn’t there always a degree of arrogance in any of us telling anyone else how to behave?
How do we arrive at common standards to be observed and enforced by all?
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights? Just about every mongrel country, including the US, subscribed to that. They are noble principles, but rarely observed and enforced by the signatories.
There’s not a lot left on the international consensus stage after that, is there?
Why doesn’t anyone get wound up now about the white slaves exported by Britain to America and Australia for a couple of centuries and which helped found those nations? http://www.eogen.com/Transportation
Just an extension of what some of the Zulu had been doing to those who stood in their way before the British arrived, but somehow it was wrong when the British did it but deserving of admiration when some of the Zulus did it to their own lot.
I respect people who are well intentioned, as everyone should.
I don’t respect pieces of shit like Mugabe, Amin, Moi etc. Nor, for that matter, turds like Bush and my recently departed Prime Minister Howard who couldn’t give shit about what happens under those regimes.
I do respect people like you who want to do something about those evils.
I just think that the political reality is that no nation which could do something about them actually gives a shit when they balance their own national interests against those of some poor bastard being marched into a forest for a bullet in the back of the neck while his wife is being raped because he’s offended the national despot or his local functionaries.
Christ, but you are a hard man to get along with. :rolleyes:
I don’t think Africa is a complete and utter mess, as distinct from the shower of shit who tend to comprise its leadership. Much of South Africa works reasonably well. Many people in black Africa have passable lives, by their standards. The existence of the electoral opposition in Zimbabwe demonstrates that the seeds of genuine democracy are flowering there, despite Mugabe’s attempts to suppress it. These are the things we should be supporting, with the same vigour that the US and Britain among others supported the inclusion of Mugabe and his revolutionaries (they’d be called terrorists nowadays) in a free poll nearly 30 years ago. The only change which will endure is one which comes from the people, not from some attempt to impose change from the outside, a la Iraq.
But the Zulus and others in Africa used servitude of the most violent kind before the whites arrived and nobody is upset about that or ascribes current problems to it. So what converted sevitude into an enduring cancer down the ages after maybe a century of European colonial rule when centuries of indigenous servitude, and slavery, before apparently had no long term effect?
Mike Oare or Hoare?
When I worked in the shearing sheds in the semi-outback in the 1960s we were sitting around one Sunday morning having a choir session (reviver) when a radio news report said there had been a car crash which killed ‘two men and a shearer’.
A while later in another state a few hundred miles away I was injured in a car accident which, if I’d known at the time about lawyers I would have got some money for the minor problem which still nags me 40 years later and would have been grounds for workers compensation payments to me. Instead, I was kicked off the property by the squattocracy cunt who owned it and paid my way back to what passed for my home base, where I spent a few unpaid skint weeks recovering.
The usual deal was that the cocky (farmer) provided meat for us at market price, so-called lamb which almost always was gamey old mutton they wouldn’t kill to feed to their dogs and was worth nothing in the market.
So we were looked down on and exploited.
So what?
Like your friend, there has always been a class which has contempt for those beneath them.
Nothing changes.
I was just lucky enough to be in a country where social contempt isn’t converted into the political action and personal violence Mugabe objected to by the white Rhodesians, and which he has magnified many times by his ‘war veterans’’ bullshit into a far greater travesty of human rights.
i love your statements, bravo, very intuitive. whats true but probably unintentional, is that england herself seemed to groom the united states into a country fit for independance. education i suppose is the key for these underdeveloped countrys, and yes, it is hard to get help from a bigger nation like the US without giving in to them for some other self serving purpose
. whats true but probably unintentional, is that england herself seemed to groom the united states into a country fit for independance. education i suppose is the key for these underdeveloped countrys, and yes, it is hard to get help from a bigger nation like the US without giving in to them for some other self serving purpose
RS, I’m in Bristol, this morning, for my niece’s wedding, just borrowed a lap top and am not very proficient.
I am familiar with the arguments you put forward, although they are a little one sided. As a quick response to your posts, I would ask, is it not true to say, do you not think, that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction in all elements of life and living?
As a general observation, it occurs to me that you argue your case as a prosecution lawyer and, subsequently, there is no middle ground, to give way is to lose the case and the guilty being found ‘not guilty’. Consequently, whatever argument I put forward, you are going to dismiss as being an excuse for the defendant i.e. Mr mugabe.
As far as I m concerned, Mugabe is guilty. He should not be allowed to escape into ‘Princely exile’ but be made to answer for his actions. In much the same way as Europeans are being tried for crimes against humaity at the Hague. In this way it might send a signal to other corrupt, African desposts that they can not get away with their crimes.
As for Africans selling Africans into slavery, every society has it’s ruthless thugs, but that doesn’t make us all gangsters. If there had not been such a demand for slaves the trafficking of them would not have developed in the way it did…that old law of supply and demand for a scarcity.
Thank you, you are quite right it is Mike Hoare, of course. Some of us uneducated Mancunians have trouble with our H’s particualry with the words Has and As. If anyone spots any errors on my part, I’d be much obliged, and by no means offended, if you would put me right.
Now, it’s off to the wedding followed by a few scoops and a knees-up on the S.S. Great Britain.
But the Zulus and others in Africa used servitude of the most violent kind before the whites arrived and nobody is upset about that or ascribes current problems to it. So what converted sevitude into an enduring cancer down the ages after maybe a century of European colonial rule when centuries of indigenous servitude, and slavery, before apparently had no long term effect?
The Zulu nation only came into being around 1820. It was a feudal society, not a slave society. No one ascribes current problems to it because it was stamped out over a hundred years ago and replaced by a more severe society. It was Zwide and his armies (later defeated by Shaka), tha created the climate of mindless murder and migration at the turn of the nineteenth centuries.
When I worked in the shearing sheds in the semi-outback in the 1960s we were sitting around one Sunday morning having a choir session (reviver) when a radio news report said there had been a car crash which killed ‘two men and a shearer’.
A while later in another state a few hundred miles away I was injured in a car accident which, if I’d known at the time about lawyers I would have got some money for the minor problem which still nags me 40 years later and would have been grounds for workers compensation payments to me. Instead, I was kicked off the property by the squattocracy cunt who owned it and paid my way back to what passed for my home base, where I spent a few unpaid skint weeks recovering.
The usual deal was that the cocky (farmer) provided meat for us at market price, so-called lamb which almost always was gamey old mutton they wouldn’t kill to feed to their dogs and was worth nothing in the market.
So we were looked down on and exploited.
So what?
So what?..So, you had choices, you could leave!
It doesn’t compare. I was describing atypical attitude that permeated white society.
Like your friend, there has always been a class which has contempt for those beneath them.
Yes, as in all societies. But this was an artificial society in which there was no opportunity for the serving classes to aspire to reach the top, as they were a conquered people.
NOPE! There was not always high crime here in SA. Since 1994 it started to become a criminal heaven. I see this everyday and have been watching this for years now.
Nelson Mandela has been made a god. He is only a man. Since he took over everything went down the drain. Education, health, all public services, police and prisons. Criminals have more rights than the person that live according to the law.
So to say it has always been a sh!t hole here incorrect. To blame it on Apartheid is bullsh!t. If you do not believe me gentlemen I will give you a little demonstration if you wish.
How many crimes occur with nobody ever prosecuted, let alone punished for them? With things like burglary, the answer is: Most of them.
How many women regularly get the shit knocked out of them by violent husbands, with no consequence for the attacker?
How many Japanese and Koreans were brought to justice and given anything approaching an equal and opposite reaction for their treatment of POWs and Asians on the Burma railway, among other places? Not many.
Where is the equal and opposite reaction to the Holocaust?
Where is the equal and opposite reaction to Mugabe and his bullshit ‘war veterans’ (many of whom weren’t even born before that war ended) assaults on and dispossession of white farmers and his violent attacks on opponents? Not just now, but in previous years.
The list is endless.
Well, I object to being accused of being a prosecutor 'cos I’ve always been a defendant’s man (with a few minor excursions to the dark side) :D, but you’re probably right.
It’s not the case that what I’m arguing today will be what I argued a year or two ago or might in the future. I swing as new information comes to light and no doubt as I am influenced by more subtle personal influences. I’ve been at just about every position in the spectrum on a lot of major issues at one time or another, and no doubt will be again.
Maybe I’m riding high on the ‘accept responsibility for your actions and stop whingeing about the past’ at the moment because I have a couple of teenage children I am trying to get to accept responsibility for their actions instead of begging off with piss weak excuses for voluntary actions, and I’m sick to bloody death at the moment of various advocates arguing that their pet group is the victim of some social evil instead of just being, say, undisciplined lazy drunken bastards who wouldn’t work in an iron lung and who have their hand out for government dollars all the time. In earlier times I’ve been more sympathetic to their plight, but there comes a time when people who won’t help themselves and who can’t even see they have a problem exhaust my sympathy. Then it’s arse kicking time.
We’re in furious agreement on that.
Be a good idea if the same principles could be applied to other errant leaders, such as despots outside Africa or democratically elected leaders who invade countries for no good reason apart from, say deluding themselves that there were weapons of mass destruction there. Precisely why that is a reason for a country with heaps of weapons of mass destruction to invade one that might have only a few is not clear to me. Weapon envy, perhaps?
Don’t know about a scarcity. I suspect that the producers grabbed as much product as they needed to satisfy demand.
If the product was scarce, you’d expect the price to be so high that the buyer took care of a product that was costly to buy and hard to replace, rather than in many cases failing to maintain the product in good working order and ensuring it had a long and productive working life.
A quiet piece of man to man advice.
If you’re looking for a bit of illicit fun, make sure you pronounce the H. Or you’ll get splinters trying to insert yourself into an oar. Or maybe the other way around, if that’s what rows your boat. :mrgreen:
Even if that’s true, it’s hardly all Mandela’s fault though, is it?
It’s not like he was an AIDS denying nutcase like Mbeki who blames AIDS in part on (children, put your hands over your ears) a modern form of Western racism or neo-colonialism towards Africa. For those who haven’t heard Mbeki’s interesting analysis of science, history and African victimisation by the West, here’s a restrained summary. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/nov/06/southafrica.aids
Anyway, is it the case that what’s happening in Joburg is happening in Cape Town, Durban and other places?
Is it a South Africa wide problem or one primarily limited to Joburg?
If supply isn’t scarce, i.e. it is abundant, then, there is no demand.
If the product was scarce, you’d expect the price to be so high that the buyer took care of a product that was costly to buy and hard to replace, rather than in many cases failing to maintain the product in good working order and ensuring it had a long and productive working life.
The commodity was scarce. that’s why thems that supplied would discuss the advantages and disadvantages of : ‘Tight packers’ or ‘Loose packers’.
The Slave Trade was driven by greed, and the lack of respect for
human life allowed it to prosper. Most of the Africans farmed in Africa,
making them ideally suited for the work that awaited them in the Americas.
They were used for farming tobacco, and sugar, and later cotton. The
journey to the Americas was tough, large numbers died on the boat.
There are two kinds of philosophies amongst the traders, the loose-packers
and the tight-packers. Loose-packers carried less slaves so that the slaves on
board had more room, more food, more water, and more liberties. They were
more likely to survive. Tight-packers believed in packing as many slaves as possible. . .
:rolleyes: