Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - Why the West Betrayed Rhodesia

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Sept. 19, 2024 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

15:37

Why the West Betrayed Rhodesia

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	In the latest issue of Islander magazine, there is an article by Will Tanner entitled Rhodesia, a Nation Betrayed, which I read with fascination, as it brought together several strands of thought that I had been mulling over and provides a concrete example of how esoteric thinkers of the 20th century, though their roots are divergent and circuitous, ended up arriving at the same conclusion about liberalism.
	In his article, Tanner details what was different about Rhodesia than the other African colonies ruled by the Europeans.
	South Africa was predominantly Boer, Mozambique and Angola were Portuguese and German East Africa was of course German.
	However, Rhodesia was primarily English, settled almost exclusively from the UK, and it retained a very strong Anglo-culture right up until its collapse.
	Rhodesia famously described itself as more British than the British, and it really showed.
	Before Cecil Rhodes had led his pioneer column into what would become Rhodesia in 1890, the land was sparsely occupied by tribes who lived at a subsistence level in what were essentially pre-technological agrarian and pastoralist groups.
	Though the English population of Rhodesia was always very small, peaking at around 300,000 in the 1970s, with around 7 million Africans, this relatively small number of Brits were able to create a nation with high living standards and industrial capacity, which was capable of fielding a tightly disciplined military known as the Fire Force.
	This was a combined light arms mobile strike force that was supremely effective at locating and destroying communist guerrilla insurgents.
	And as far as I can see, they never lost an engagement, and it was only because of the great betrayal of Rhodesia by the West that Rhodesia was forced to capitulate.
	As Tanner details in his article, Rhodesia was run on the paternalistic model of the British Empire and allowed a limited franchise.
	Only educated, property-owning people were able to vote, the same democratic system, incidentally, that the United States was founded upon.
	The Rhodesians, after having set up their own civilization equal to contemporary European societies, invested a great amount of time and money into raising up the African natives to a greater standard of living, which allowed their population to double in only a single generation.
	There was no system of apartheid in Rhodesia.
	The Anglo-Rhodesians lived cheek by jowl with the Africans.
	They employed them as domestic servants and labourers and seemed to get on well enough with them, even if there was a minority rule of the country.
	It wasn't that the Rhodesians had rules that stipulated that Africans could not own property and be incorporated into the political system.
	They were, however, keenly aware that the preservation of high standards in personal and political life, a traditionally British preoccupation at the time, had enabled their civilization to flourish, and it was this that allowed them to build a first world country out of nothing.
	A few black Africans have fine homes like these on the outskirts of Salisbury.
	As the population grows, so too will the ambitions of the black majority.
	There were a minority of Africans who had taken very well to British education, did own property and were able to vote, but this was always a very small proportion of the African population, and this inequality became a fixation to the Western powers as much as to the communist powers during the Cold War.
	However, the living standards for both the Anglo and African populations of Rhodesia were very high compared to their neighbours, and it seemed that this trend of incorporation would gradually increase over time if it were allowed to develop.
	Generation after generation, more Africans would have been given the franchise, would have owned property, would have been able to uphold the country that had grown up around them.
	What this arrangement wasn't, however, was liberal.
	This is a young country to which the white man came only 120 years ago.
	Today, the white man is outnumbered 20 to 1 by the black.
	But the political power is his, because the Rhodesian doctrine is that the reins of government must remain in what Mr. Smith describes as civilized hands.
	It's this insistence that makes a settlement impossible while the British government stands firm on the five principles.
	Rhodesia's success was built on a practical compromise in which all groups could find some benefit, a typically British colonial attitude at the time.
	Inequality was indeed a part of life, and the pragmatic colonial mindset was to accept the differences between the Anglos and the Africans and attempts towards mitigating and improving circumstances for the good of all.
	After the Second World War, liberalism became the ruling creed of the Western powers due to the hegemony of the United States, the greatest liberal experiment yet, and this moral system was imposed upon places for which it was not well suited.
	Liberalism as an ideology holds that all people are fundamentally the same in all places and all times, which means they are all entitled to an absolute equality of the same set of rights, and to be properly moral means to concede everything to this abstract demand.
	And I want to be clear that I don't think this was actually a conscious decision on the part of the United States or Americans either.
	They are not the villains of this piece.
	They are as much the victims of ideology as anyone else.
	The 20th century was the century of ideology.
	And ideology was a relatively new phenomenon at the time, having only been a growing part of the political process for roughly 100 years until that point.
	Moreover, extracting oneself from ideology is a very difficult thing to do that I will discuss elsewhere at another time.
	I don't blame the people of the 20th century for not having accomplished in their day what we are still struggling with now.
	Returning to Rhodesia, reality imposed restrictions that required compromises.
	Again, not to be too blunt about it, but the Rhodesians were attempting to bring people who they had found living in the Stone Age, without even the wheel, to the level of the most advanced industrial societies the world had yet then known.
	The social institutions required to accomplish this goal take time to develop, and this time was denied to them by the Western powers.
	The standard is, if I can put words in your mouth and forgive me for doing so, that there are certain people in this country who don't have the necessary level of sophistication or education to be allowed to vote.
	That is correct.
	As I say, it applies to you whatever your colour.
	Now that is seen by many people in the outside world as racist.
	Do you consider yourself a racist?
	No, I certainly don't.
	In fact, I live so close to the problem of racialism with so many black people around me that I think I'm conscious of the need to ensure that I am not a racist.
	The system that Rhodesia ran under, which was created by the British, was declared anathematic to Britain.
	Whether you support this position or not, it is evident that such a policy was doomed to failure because of the circumstances of the peoples involved, and history, of course, bears this out.
	This is not a moral judgment, but a practical fact.
	The process of decolonization in Africa was a gradual process of decline, as people who did not have the skills required to maintain a certain level of civilization were given control over it, which is to say, of course, nothing of the massacres that went along with such changes.
	During the decolonization of Africa, it was under Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson's demand of NIMBA, meaning the decolonization of Africa would only be done with majority rule, that caused the Britain-loving Rhodesians under Ian Smith to unilaterally declare independence from Britain.
	As a left-wing politician, Wilson had an intransigently ideological perspective on the situation, and the liberal perspective dictates, as we covered, that fundamentally people are all the same and therefore must have the same rights, and in this case that meant universal suffrage, regardless of the real-world consequences that this would have.
	In 1974, Ian Smith appeared on Firing Line with William F. Buckley to discuss Rhodesia, in which Buckley conducted what amounted to a liberal inquisition against Smith.
	Buckley would advance positions that presumed all people were the same, and therefore the differences in society were not justified.
	And Smith would respond in a manner that respected the moral cause of Buckley's liberalism, but explained that circumstances on the ground revealed that it was wrong, and by adopting Buckley's position, he would bring about the ruination of his own country.
	Do you think that this is largely because of these tribal traditions you have described, or is it a feeling of impotence that results from their feeling that this is a white society governed by white people for the benefit of white people?
	I don't believe that they are influenced by that.
	There are a few who are politically motivated, yes, the agitators, the political leaders, I don't deny this, but the vast majority of them openly say, We've always lived under a system where you have governed the country and we're satisfied with what you have done.
	We are happy under our tribal system, why don't you leave us alone?
	And quite frankly, when you go amongst them and see how they live, I think it is debatable as to whether our system is better than theirs.
	The Liberal West could simply not understand Smith's realist position, and so branded Rhodesia as a racist country.
	In doing so, they sealed Rhodesia's fate by siding with the communist bloc and ensuring that Rhodesia would not survive.
	The majority of Africans in Rhodesia had supported and cooperated with the Anglo-dominated Rhodesian government.
	Many had fought in its military and desired to take advantage of the material prosperity Rhodesia had attained.
	The small number of African communist guerrillas, many of whom were not Rhodesian, were not able to find great purchase in the prospering African societies of Rhodesia and were often turned into the authorities by the Africans themselves.
	But the communist guerrillas were well supplied with arms, fuel and intelligence by the communist powers, while the Western powers imposed sanctions and blockades on Rhodesia and its allies for being insufficiently liberal.
	Well, there's got to be some reason for the consternation that the mere mention of Rhodesia causes.
	In many parts of the world, there is a general conviction that it is a racist society, one for the benefit of white people.
	Now, this could be objectively true, irrespective of the question of whether the excluded blacks were perfectly contented.
	You would acknowledge that, wouldn't you?
	Yes, I accept that this is a situation that exists, but I believe wrongly so.
	I think most of our critics have never taken the trouble to come here and find out the facts for themselves.
	On this point, the communists and liberals were in agreement.
	Distinctions between peoples were morally forbidden to be recognised, regardless of the reality on the ground.
	And the history of race relations in the United States was used by Buckley to bludgeon Smith, even where it wasn't applicable.
	Rhodesia had never been a slave society, and the United States had always been majority European.
	Things were not the same, and yet the singular standard was advanced because of the ideological commitments of the West and the East.
	It is noteworthy that two very different philosophers arrived from completely different angles on much the same point in this regard.
	In Revolt Against the Modern World, the very right-wing Julius Evolo noted that the capitalist West and communist East both were materialistic and ideological powers which were converging on the old, practical, traditional methods of life.
	Quote, Russia and America are like two ends of the same pair of pincers that are closing in from east and west around the nucleus of ancient Europe, which is too depleted in its energies and in its men to put up an effective resistance.
	The very left-wing Herbert Marcuse makes the same observation in One Dimensional Man.
	Marcuse barely even distinguishes between capitalism and communism, noting that they are both industrial technological societies which compress human life down into a singular ideological dimension in which opposites are forced to live in tension with one another.
	The force of this society captures and contains the scope of human activity within its systems of domination, which is less favourable than the kind of society that had preceded it.
	The philosophy of liberalism, whether expressed in the classical sense by the United States or the extreme sense in the Soviet Union, had ensnared Rhodesia by completely capturing the minds of its adherents and caused them to bear down on this last nucleus of ancient Europe as embodied by Rhodesia.
	Isolated on the world stage, starved of fuel by the British government, and under great ideological pressure while bleeding population as Anglos fled to South Africa, Rhodesia eventually capitulated in 1979.
	Though Rhodesia had won the battles, it had lost the war, and Robert Mugabe's sanguinary dictatorship began in April 1980.
	We had betrayed them to the communist race terrorists.
	And you can explore the history of Zimbabwe to discover what a tragedy that became.
	I want to thank Will for his incredible article in Islander, which explains all of this in much better detail than I can do here.
	So do follow the link in the description and pick up issue two.
	It will only be available for a few weeks, so make sure you get it before it's gone.
	The franchise is not that wide, is it, to allow every black man to vote?
	No, it isn't that wide to allow every white man to vote either.
	We simply have a standard, you see.
	And I wonder if it isn't a good thing when you see what is happening in the world today, how standards have dropped and how irresponsible governments can be.
	We have always had the standard, I would remind you, going right back to the beginning of our history, in the days when the British government was implicated.

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