Heart of Politically Correct Darkness: Death in Zimbabwe
I got a note today from an African friend. He describes himself as “sad and angry” over the death of our mutual friend, Kobus Joubert. We don’t know all the details yet, but he was apparently shot and killed on his farm in Zimbabwe.
You won’t recognize his name, but Kobus was a wonderful man with a rare combination of courage, generosity and virtue. He ran the programme that created 9,000 successful black small tobacco farmers in three years without government help and only with the resources of the farmers themselves and the tobacco growers’ association. These small scale farmers have mostly also now lost everything, because they depended on the big commercial farmers to help them farm profitably.
As my friend writes:
Despite Mugabe’s destruction of his country, Kobus never lost his commitment to Zimbabwe and its people. When he realized that there would be no corn crop because the big farmers had been kicked off their farms, he planted corn instead of tobacco and told the locals that they could come and harvest it from his farm, to stay alive over the winter. When his farm was eventually seized, he refused to go away; he lived in a caravan on the side of the gravel road at the entrance to his farm. Eventually last year, the Mugabe politicians returned his farm to him, mostly due to pressure from the locals in his district.
This killing is about more than wasting a good man’s life, it is about destroying the goodness of life itself for an entire nation. All Zimbabweans will in time rue the day that Kobus died, because he represented so much opportunity and had done so much good. And it was killed off with him. His death is another triumph for evil in Zimbabwe.
Years ago, Gabriel Ledeen (Captain, USMC, inactive reserves) and I went to Zimbabwe and spent a week with Kobus and his colleagues, and saw first hand the miracles they performed for the black farmers of the country. Mugabe hated it, and drove most all of the white farmers out of the country. Kobus was one of a handful who stayed behind.
When I listen to all those folks who bemoan African poverty and pull on the heartstrings of wrongly guilt-ridden Westerners to extort “aid” to “save” the poor Africans, I am reminded of men like Kobus, and many others I have known. They knew that “aid” only enriched the tyrants and doomed the poor. If the West were serious about helping Africa, we’d direct our energies on the overthrow of evil men like Mugabe (add your own favorites here) and strengthen the forces of freedom, which abound all over the continent.
But political correctness dictates that we are not entitled to criticize “other cultures,” and our only option is to apologize for our past presumed sins and transfer wealth to those rulers who are relentlessly wrecking their countries and killing those who are genuinely working to make things better.
It’s a murderous ideology, and Kobus is its latest victim. But not the last.
What a tragedy for Mr. Joubert and those who knew him, and what has happened to Zimbabwe since Mugabe came to power is a tragedy writ nationwide. Zimbabwe was once the breadbasket of southern Africa, but now it’s a Hell on Earth. And all due to the megalomania of one man and the swine who support him. I don’t believe in intervening in every tragic place in the world, but, as with Iraq, some regimes are so evil that it’s immoral not to intervene.
yeah, I feel sorry for the farmers.
But I also remember when the gov’t there cleared an area of locals in order to sell it to white farmers.
The locals were given “new” farms, i.e. dumped in an uncleared area without schools, shops, roads or infrastructure, as if they could simply rebuild and settle without any problem.
Alas, the “new” land was lower in altitude, which meant it was a malaria area; and the Mashona, who traditionally live in the high veldt, had no malaria resistance, and so many died.
Land reform was a good idea. Much of the European farm land was not occupied and was given out much earlier.
Mugabe blew it by destroying the good farms by giving them to his henchmen who weren’t farmers. “Heart of darkness”? yes. I don’t mourn land reform but that it was done so corruptly, to keep him in power.
78% of the farms seized by Mugabe’s regime were bought after 1980, with the permission and approval of the Mugabe government. Due to laws requiring commercial farmers to justify land use, the commercial farmers in Zimbabwe were amongst the most productive on the continent. Most of the European owned land was occupied and productive or were conservation areas. That is why 75 Zimbabwean farmers who went to Zambia after losing their farms in Zimbabwe nearly doubled Zambian tobacco production. This was not land reform in Zimbabwe, but government sanctioned theft.
Political correctness has been very effective in creating hordes of accomplices to evil.
Mortimer Adler got it right, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Dewey, Bertrand Russell, Sidney Hook, et al., got it wrong.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,816146,00.html
More than forty years ago, in my early twenties, I was approached at the business I owned by a friend asking for a favor. Not for himself but for a fine young Rhodesian student he had in tow whose fiance couldn’t leave Rhodesia for the US without an American guarantor who would sign State Department papers assuring her employment in the US.
I thought immediately of Jewish refugees from Hitler’s Germany a generation earlier and how much I loathed the State Department. The young man–my own age, really–spoke movingly of conditions in his homeland. Why didn’t his people resist? I asked . If a native so much as picks up a stone, I was told, he would be shot. I sponsored the lady sight unseen.
Not long thereafter I was approached again and guaranteed employment for other Rhodesians. And again.
I have always wondered where they ended up, these refugees from apartheid I sponsored. Listening to leftist anti-Semites and America haters like Mandela and Tutu and following subsequent events in South Africa and Rhodesia I wondered if I did the right thing.
Was I just a soft-hearted, mush-minded American Jewish sucker? Were my actions inimical to both Jews and the United States? I don’t know. But knowing what I do today, I wouldn’t do it again.
don’t be so hard on yourself. today you’d ask better questions because you’ve learned some things that a young man could not have known…