Zimbabwe's Funny Kind Of "Plague"

Charles Crawford comes to the Blogosphere with a pretty amazing C.V.; his bio notes that he recently retired from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office “after nearly three decades in the UK’s Diplomatic Service, most of it spent serving in or dealing with communist and post-communist Europe.” And in a recent post, he spots the BBC putting all of the pieces together in its “coverage” of Zimbabwe:

According to the BBC it has been ‘plagued’ (origin of said plagues not described) by the world’s highest inflation, as well as acute food and fuel shortages.

Newsflash: These phenomena are not caused by ‘plagues’.

They are caused both in general and in Zimbabwe’s case in particular by truly stunning and sustained Bad Government.

The BBC’s use of the plague metaphor in this context somehow craftily shifts the responsibility for Zimbabwe’s calamitous plight on to … no-one?

Sounds like the Beeb’s “Powerfully Corrosive Internal Culture” hard at obfuscatory work, yet again.