06/23/2008
So Robert Mugabe has won the Zimbabwean election by his traditional methods: violent intimidation and murder.
Opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai pulled out of Zimbabwe’s violence-wracked presidential runoff Sunday, declaring the election was no longer credible and the loss of life among his supporters was simply too high.
The announcement cleared the way for President Robert Mugabe to continue his 28-year rule, despite mounting condemnation from even loyal African allies that the former independence hero has become a despot who has bankrupted the country’s once thriving economy.
(Zimbabwe opposition leader pulling out of election By Angus Shaw Associated Press June 22, 2008)
An interesting feature of today’s news coveravwge is how much more explicit the non-US Anglophone press is about the actual details of the violence than the American. An honorable exception is today’s Los Angeles Times;
New wave of attacks on Zimbabwe opposition ratchets up the death toll
By A Times Staff Writer
June 22 2008
The pair saw their three colleagues and an unknown passerby being taken away to a makeshift militia camp where victims are interrogated and beaten. The location: the local kindergarten. The mob then looted and gas-bombed the house.
"The house was in flames. They started celebrating," Chipiyo said.
The body of one of the activists was found the next day, his genitals cut off. Archiford’s body turned up two days later with a gunshot wound to the head, witnesses said. The body of a third activist had an ax wound in the skull.
The fourth person was in critical condition in a hospital.
Zimbabwe was of particular concern to our late stalwart, Sam Francis, who pertinently asked six years ago “What Did We Expect?” As I noted last year
Sam was one of a handful engaged in skirmishes in Washington (the disparity of forces was such they could hardly be called battles) in the early 1970s attempting to gain a hearing for the point of view of Ian Smith, the leader of the then Rhodesia. Smith argued that the likes of Mugabe, the current Zimbabwean President, were not suitable to rule the country, then one of the most prosperous in Africa.
The forces of Political Corrctness won, of course, in no small measure by white self hate in the Northern Hemisphere, and hundreds of thousands of lives have been ruined as a result. Sam was right, conventional opinion wrong — although very unwilling to admit it. Unlike his opponents, Sam continued his interest in the unfortunate country.
Things are now so bad in Zimbabwe that some of the Smith regime’s most dedicated opponents have recanted. Last year Judith Todd, the prominent white liberal who in her youth was a kind of pin up girl for enemies of Ian Smith’s attempt to win independence for the country with white rule, was asked:
But hasn’t what happened fully justified Ian Smith and the white racists who predicted that black rule would mean dictatorship, corruption and chaos?
and replied
“You have to say they called it right…Smith did love the country which was why he gave way rather than see it destroyed. Mugabe is destroying it rather than give way".
The nice thing about black rule is that it gives a lot of credulous people a bracing drenching in reality.
Bring on President Obama!
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