Racialism Begets Realism

     Courtesy of InstaPundit, we have this remarkable racialist rant from a major politician in a nation whose black government has decided to dispossess its whites:

     As violence against white farmers continues, following the South African parliament's decision to seize all farmland from whites without compensation, Julius Malema, leader of the Marxist-Revolutionary Economic Freedom Party, continues to spew hateful rhetoric against South Africa's white citizens....

     [Malema continued] “A racist country like Australia says: ‘The white farmers are being killed in South Africa.’ We are not killing them. Now Australia says: ‘Malema, EFF want to kill white farmers, they must come to Australia.’"

     “If they want to go, they must go. They must leave the keys to their tractors because we want to work the land, they must leave the keys to their houses because we want to stay in those houses. They must leave everything they did not come here with in South Africa and go to Australia.”

     Reynolds also reminds us of this Nick Kristof piece from thirteen years ago:

     The hungry children and the families dying of AIDS here are gut-wrenching, but somehow what I find even more depressing is this: Many, many ordinary black Zimbabweans wish that they could get back the white racist government that oppressed them in the 1970’s.

     “If we had the chance to go back to white rule, we’d do it,” said Solomon Dube, a peasant whose child was crying with hunger when I arrived in his village. “Life was easier then, and at least you could get food and a job.”

     Mr. Dube acknowledged that the white regime of Ian Smith was awful. But now he worries that his 3-year-old son will die of starvation, and he would rather put up with any indignity than witness that.

     An elderly peasant in another village, Makupila Muzamba, said that hunger today is worse than ever before in his seven decades or so, and said: “I want the white man’s government to come back. Even if whites were oppressing us, we could get jobs and things were cheap compared to today.”

     His wife, Mugombo Mudenda, remembered that as a younger woman she used to eat meat, drink tea, use sugar and buy soap. But now she cannot even afford corn gruel. “I miss the days of white rule,” she said.

     Nearly every peasant I’ve spoken to in Zimbabwe echoed those thoughts.

     Note that the responses he received “depressed” Kristof. Note also that those quoted in the Kristof article insist that the white-dominated government “oppressed” them...but they still want it back.

     I have three questions:

1. Did white Rhodesians enslave black Rhodesians under Ian Smith’s government?
2. Supposing, entirely for the sake of argument, that they could have a white regime back on the condition that black Rhodesians would forever after be denied the “right” to vote, would they take that bargain?
3. Again, entirely for the sake of argument, were black Rhodesians to accept the bargain outlined above, what would Western liberals have to say about it?

     It was, after all, black Rhodesians who brought about the transformation of prosperous Rhodesia into Robert Mugabe’s hellish Zimbabwe. Once blacks were enfranchised, they voted for it en masse. The destruction of Rhodesia’s prosperity was also accomplished by black Rhodesians / Zimbabweans. Now that they lament the fruits of their willfulness, would they recant on their demands? And would Western liberals, ever oh-so-sensitive on matters of race and “self-determination,” let Rhodesia Reborn go its own way without trying to interfere?

     Food for thought.