Lion in Winter

Well exactly.

I thought it was daft myself.

Nevertheless, there it is. The people with "brown faces" on the bus caused you to lament excessive immigration to the UK, presumably without having spoken to them to find out their nationalities. And then there was your statement of "Mad Bob's already killed or driven away most of the whites - along with millions of his black countrymen and women".

If you don't, in fact, think it's possible to detect nationality from skin colour, then you should be more careful how you write, and possibly even think.

paulry

Your argument is indeed a daft one which once again is as weak as nats piss, else you wouldn't have felt the need to refer back to an embellished ("brown faces") version of the bus argument that we had way back in 2009. That by the way was yet another fine example of political correctness being deployed to stifle reasonable discussion about valid concerns.

ededed

This is like watching 2 bald men fighting over a comb.

paulry

You're right, it was a complete waste of time and achieved nothing.

Paul Hwingwiri

Zim aint faring better now than before

scot47

Only the SERIOUSLY stupid and poorly-informed could take this website at face value. Of course the world is full of stupid and poorly informed people.

Zimbabwe is not a place to be, but this website is just cuckoo.

If the whites in Rhodesia had been a bit smarter it could have worked out differently.

Sid Read

Ian Smith was too thick to be PM. I have no idea how he conned the people of Rhodesia into UDI if they weren't as thick & xenophobic as he was!

I've studied & read a lot about the war. I reckon that the reason the Rhodies lost is because they failed to aid black civilians who aided them, but they punished severely those who aided the "terrorists". This alienated a black population that was broadly supportive of Rhodesia at first. Once the rural Africans had been suitably alienated the terrs found it much easier to move around the country using the population as cover. Rhodesia lost the war because it was riddled with racism, a fact I doubt many would argue.

Then after independence the whites refused to adjust to the new political landscape & refused to engage socially or economically. They fought to maintain their life-style & mindset. They were not open to reconciliation. If they stayed kept their racist ideology & supremacism & if they left they took it with them. Those departing also took their know-how & resources, draining the country of skills & finance. They left not because they did not love Zimbabwe, they left because they did not wish to see black Zimbabwe become a success, they wanted Zimbabwe to fail.

I doubt it's a coincidence that the Zimbabwe economy has shrunk by 90% in the same amount of time it's taken the white populations to shrink a similar percentage.

dfjordan

I understand your point of view Sid, although I don't agree with it. I was also there during those years before it all fell apart in the 70's. In my opinion, once the UK had decided that it would be better to get Rhodesia out of its hair, the whites there had no chance of continuing in power, when they were up against all the communist assistance that the terrs were receiving. During my times in the army, I was in charge of protected villages, which showed that the whites fid at least do something to help out the poor locals that were trying to resist the terrs.
Out of interest, and I know it's always easy to look back and criticise, but what would you have done knowing that you no longer had the support of the UK?

Sid Read

Hindsight is always 20/20, I agree.

Basically, if I had been involved in policy making during the years when the war was hotting up I'd have encouraged much more engagement & investment in the rural population. Racist doctrine meant that even when the Rhodesian forces were helped by the locals they did nothing in return. In fact, often the exact opposite.

Here's a story I heard last night on a youtube doc on Rhodesia recounted by Sir Garfield Todd. He described an incident where a group of terrs turned up at a village & the headman snuck away to tell the Rhodie soldiers about it because he knew that if the soldiers found out his village had fed & watered the terrs they'd ship the whole village to what were little more than internment camps (or "protected villages" as they were called).

The headman took some time to walk to the soldiers, who kept him overnight while they sent a patrol to the village. The patrol found no terrs because they ahd eaten & left but they arbitrarily shot & killed a couple of villagers anyway, as punishment for collaberating. When the headman returned the villagers killed him in return for sneaking off & telling on them. Todd said this was just one example of hundreds that were occurring all the time during the war years that were completely undermining the war effort. No-one in the Rhodesian regime appeared to be paying any attention to him, perhaps because he was British.

If, instead of killing innocent villagers or hounding them into concentration camps the government had supported & engaged with rural people it might have taken longer for the enemy to infiltrate as deeply as they did giving the government more time to establish the country-wide infrastructure needed to take & hold ground. The Rhodesians worked their strategy around their resources which, although hi-tech compared to the insurgents, were hardly huge. This meant using the "fire-force" technique of attacking suddenly by air but then leaving the ground to be re-invaded. The same strategy failed for the Americans in Vietnam for the same reasons, the Americans alienated the South Vietnamese population & the insurgents moved amongst them.

The war in Rhodesia failed because the support of the population for the freedom fighters was increasing exponentially with every year as they became more & more disenfranchised by Rhodie culture & government policy.

Post independence, if white society had developed a more inclusive attitude to building a nation where the wealth, expertise, land & resources were shared & hadn't deserted the country & developed a strategy to discredit & destabilise it from abroad, the collapse might have been slower or even arrested.

Of course, Mugabe hardly helped. A good leader in war is not always a good leader out of war. Mugabe did lead a war that won him the country.

Who knows. We are where we are now. All we can do is go from here.