Poly: Conservative Stronghold?

[regexcellent]

that's hardly telling the whole story. the two resistance groups refused to stop fighting unless they were able to stand in the elections that would follow. the 'internal settlement' which led to abel muzorewa's government, failed to stop the violence. the british government negotiated a settlement which stopped the violence and allowed for the transition to independence and majority rule.

he was the leader of a resistance movement and represented the largest ethnic group (the shona). there was no other choice but to allow him to stand.

Not exactly. What Mugabe said is that he wouldn't stop fighting unless he were elected. Which is pretty much why he shouldn't have been allowed to run. ZIPRA, which was generally more agreeable and supportive of peace (though by no means made up of angels), stood to gain from this and would have supported it. The support of ZIPRA and probably by extension Zambia, as well as the lifting of sanctions, would have probably allowed Rhodesia-Zimbabwe to quash the insurgency. Note that the Rhodesian Security Forces were very, very effective in the battlefield. The Rhodesians invented much of modern counter-insurgency warfare. The only thing they lacked was international support; instead, the terrorists had it. It's interesting to note that Rhodesia was on pretty nearly equal footing with ZANLA and ZIPRA in terms of arms due to Communist support of the insurgents.

There's something else to consider here, which is that Mugabe is objectively worse than the minority government was (no small feat!). People face more political repression and the economy is worse than it was even at the height of the bush war, when not only was there constant fighting but there were crippling international sanctions.

this is true, but no one seriously argues that he wouldn't have won a fair election (rather like putin in this respect).

Yes. I just wanted to make clear that he has never been concerned with democracy.

[Hauldren Collider]

Also, Zimbabwe just sounds stupid. Rhodesia was a much cooler name

And seriously, who can honestly say that "Harare" is a better name than Salisbury?

[regexcellent]

Harare isn't even the historical name of the city. It was founded as Salisbury; Harare if I recall was one of the suburbs. Mugabe basically did the same thing as Mobutu Sese Seko where he changed everything to remove "imperialist influences" and such.

That name wasn't changed until a number of years after the country name changed though.

[giblets]

Also, Zimbabwe just sounds stupid. Rhodesia was a much cooler name

And seriously, who can honestly say that "Harare" is a better name than Salisbury?

Salisbury is a pretty stupid name. De-anglicizing the names probably wasn't such a bad idea. One of Mugabe's few good deeds.

[Hauldren Collider]

gribbler has horrible taste in city names, which is an extremely important trait

[Al B. Sure!]

Also, Zimbabwe just sounds stupid. Rhodesia was a much cooler name

This is one of the most ignorant things you've said. It's real small but it really is ignorant.

Yes, Rhodesia, naming it after Cecil Rhodes, an English imperialist, is better than a name using the native language in reference to the ancient settlement of Zimbabwe...

[regexcellent]

I think he knows that. He's not judging it based on any sense of historical sensitivity.

[C0ckney]

What Mugabe said is that he wouldn't stop fighting unless he were elected. Which is pretty much why he shouldn't have been allowed to run.

again excluding the leader of the largest ethnic group was not a serious option for peace.

ZIPRA, which was generally more agreeable and supportive of peace (though by no means made up of angels), stood to gain from this and would have supported it. The support of ZIPRA and probably by extension Zambia, as well as the lifting of sanctions, would have probably allowed Rhodesia-Zimbabwe to quash the insurgency

well, hindsight is 20/20. however, again you implicitly acknowledge that excluding zanu-pf (as it became) from the elections would have prolonged the war.

my argument is not that mugabe was a great democrat or that things turned out well under his leadership. it's simply that given the situation at the time, allowing him to stand was the most reasonable choice.

[giblets]

Making peace with Maoist terrorists was obviously not a reasonable choice.

[regexcellent]

well, hindsight is 20/20. however, again you implicitly acknowledge that excluding zanu-pf (as it became) from the elections would have prolonged the war.

Yes, I think that in any scenario where Robert Mugabe didn't wind up in power, the war would have been prolonged. The question is, would it be better to prolong the war in order to avoid Robert Mugabe coming into power? I think the answer is yes. But as you say, hindsight is 20/20.

Ultimately I think the way the international community responded to the Rhodesia issue in general was wrong going back to 1965. It very well may be that by 1980 things weren't salvageable. On the other hand, giving Mugabe a knighthood was kind of ridiculous no matter how you slice it.

[kentonio]

The test-makers (but not the test), kentonio, and Ben.

Except that I never actually said that, and in fact said the opposite..[/QUOTE]

New composite graph, this one combines results for Mad Monk, Imran, Lorizael, Robert, reg, me, DinoDoc, Boris, Alby, N35t0r, Ben, Sir Og, kentonio, Donegeal, and Hauldren Collider:

Impressive given I never actually posted any results here.

I ended up real close to 0,0 Maybe I'm not that right.

Scary, it's like you're a traditional Republican or something.

[molly bloom]

Was Hitler an environmentalist? He was a vegetarian and loved his country home, but can anyone name anything Hitler ever did for the environment?

Erm, autobahns. And his air force created open spaces for lots of weeds and wild flowers to flourish in cities across Europe.

On May Day 1945, just a week before the VE Day celebrations, the director of Kew Gardens gave a talk on the wild flowers of London's bomb-sites. The Times, sensing the event's eccentricity, or perhaps some deep metaphor, covered it as its lead news story. Professor Edward Salisbury, speaking in the fragile shell of the Savoy Chapel Royal ("itself hit four times and damaged 11 times") had described how a whole new suite of plants had taken advantage of the city's open wounds. Their names were evocative: many-seeded goosefoot; gallant soldiers; Senecio squalidus. For the most part they were interlopers and opportunists, immigrants from southern Europe and north America. Their seeds had drifted in on returning soldiers' boots and transatlantic food aid, or had sprung to life after being buried for generations under concrete. The Canadian fleabane had reputedly arrived in Europe in the stuffing of a parrot sent to Germany. Salisbury's catalogue of phoenixes and fifth-columnists suggested links between the affairs of humans and wild nature that seemed to have, for want of a better word, meaning. The odd thing, looking back 60 years later, is that neither Salisbury nor the Times even considered such a perspective. The green upsurge isn't presented as a symbol of the resilience of life in the face of adversity or of the new cosmopolitanism. Nor, for that matter, as an allegory of wartime's reawakening of the dark powers of the wilderness. This was the ambivalent view of the novelist Rose Macaulay as she rummaged through the catacombs of the City, where "fireweed" (rosebay willowherb) "ran over Inigo Jones's court-room", a sign of "the irremediable barbarism that comes up from the depth of the earth". No - for most people, nature was simply part of our "heritage", a source of educative fascination and occasional wonder.

As if to confirm this largely utilitarian view, Salisbury's full bomb-site tally - 157 species - was published a few months later as an appendix to one of 1945's surprise bestsellers, London's Natural History, a lead title in a mould-breaking new series from William Collins. The "New Naturalist" volumes were intended, in the editors' words, to "recapture the enquiring spirit of the old naturalists" and to foster "the natural pride of the British public in their native fauna and flora". They seemed to capture a yearning in at least part of the public, and the first two titles sold more than 30,000 copies each in their first 18 months. Over the decades that followed, the series became a publishing phenomenon, and with a 60-year-long list of quality volumes probably has no rival in any other area of specialist publishing. They turned schoolboy birds'-nesters into ornithologists, and line the shelves of every British naturalist over the age of 30. Many have been standard texts on degree courses and have helped to shape the outlook of the professionals who run Britain's conservation industry. The series is going through one of its active spells at present (the latest volume, Islands by RJ Berry, came out last month), and the republication of the first 10 titles in facsimile provides an opportunity to assess its influence at a time when a rather different kind of writing about nature is in vogue. The massive changes in Britain's wildlife and landscape over half a century are obvious from its pages. But so, persistently, is a peculiarly British attitude towards natural history - meticulous, obdurate and disengaged.

From our vantage point, the New Naturalists'(NN) early success seems puzzling. The end of a war that had ravaged the whole fabric of European civilisation seems an odd moment to be bothered about pride in the nation's wildlife. But Britain's landscape (and to some extent its "native fauna and flora") had been a central motif in wartime propaganda, and in the vision of those who were planning the postwar world. Frank Newbould's Ministry of Information poster, "Your Britain. Fight for It Now", showed (to the disgruntlement, it must be said, of the millions whose personal Britain was a blitzed city) a rhapsodic view of a shepherd leading his flock home over the South Downs. In the darkest days of the war in 1940, the popular radio naturalist James Fisher, who was later to be a central figure in the New Naturalist series, published a bestselling book on Watching Birds. "Some people," he argued, "might consider an apology necessary for a book about birds at a time when Britain is fighting for its own and many other lives. I make no such apology. Birds are part of the heritage we are fighting for." A similar spirit enthused the various committees optimistically set up by the government as early as 1942 to plan Britain's postwar nature reserves and national parks. A historic white paper of 1947, "The Conservation of Nature in England and Wales", contained a startlingly bold and elegant encapsulation of their vision. The National Parks Commission was to "construct for the people a lasting and pleasurable resort". Nature, in short, was to become an ingredient of the postwar social settlement, the welfare state out of doors. But it wasn't to be the people themselves or utopian philosophers or even resurrected "old naturalists" who were to set the agenda for this arcadia. Instead the task was to be delegated to a "national Biological Service", staffed by meritocrats from the burgeoning sciences of genetics and ecology.

The chairman of the committee was Julian Huxley, the latest scion of a starry family, who went on to become director-general of Unesco. In the spring of 1942, Huxley was approached by Billy Collins, head of the family firm, to solicit his support for a series of popular books on natural history. An impromptu first editorial meeting soon followed at the Jardin des Gourmets in Soho, with James Fisher and the Austrian refugee printing specialist Wolfgang Foges also present. The editorial board, and the credo of the series, were established over lunch. As with the proposed national parks, a rigorously scientific approach, tempered by populism, was the goal. The geographer Dudley Stamp, who soon joined the board, reflected breezily in a draft of one of his own New Naturalist titles (Nature Conservation in Britain, no 49, 1969): "A bright new series was a godsend to harassed seekers after presents, as well to a public hungry for peace and forgetfulness of war. What better than natural history?" But the credo the editors printed on the back of every new title established a more earnest house style. The public pride they set such store by was to be maintained by "high standard of accuracy combined with clarity of exposition in presenting the results of modern scientific research". The books were to be grouped into two rough categories, studies of species and groups of organisms, and accounts of habitats and geographical regions. Fisher hoped that above all they would be infused by the excitement of firsthand observation in the field. A view of natural history as a way of understanding humanity's role in the scheme of things was some way in the future, but the series was at least shaping up to become, in effect, guidebooks to the British people's "lasting and pleasurable resort".

The first two titles express the diversity of subject and author the editors hoped for. Butterflies is an uncompromisingly technical view by the reader in genetics at Oxford, EB Ford; London's Natural History is a brisker and more accessible documentary by an industrious amateur naturalist and freelance journalist, Richard Fitter. Yet, despite the editors' wish to capture a new public, both titles follow a deeply conventional, even old-fashioned structure. Fitter devotes the entire first half of his book to the historical growth of London. Ford starts off with a "History of Collecting". Nothing expresses the difference in sensibilities between the 1940s and today than his account of a mass assault on what is now one of Britain's rarest butterflies: "I once captured numbers of the black hairstreak by climbing into a tree and, armed with a net on a long pole, sweeping them off the leaves on a neighbouring oak which was sticky with [honeydew]. I may add that very few of the specimens were worth keeping, so quickly does this insect damage itself on the wing."

But both books are redeemed by their documentary detail. Ford's genetics chapters are a struggle, but he is fascinating on how variation occurs, on how butterflies communicate, on the purple emperor's taste for carrion. Fitter's main theme was the extraordinary adaptability of wildlife to the seemingly hostile conditions of a big city. He recounts how vast numbers of zebra mussels had colonised the water mains of south London, and how house mice were thriving in the stores of the Royal Albert Dock, growing thicker fur and dining off bags of frozen kidneys.

Graphic and telling anecdotes of this kind swarm in the first 10 NN volumes. The ichneumon fly lays its eggs in the body of a living caterpillar, which the hatched larvae then proceed to eat alive, from the inside - a lifecycle that shocked Charles Darwin, but not AD Imms, author of Insect Natural History (no 8, 1947). The parasitic dodder, an entirely rootless plant, slithers across the land in search of its host, like a snake (British Plant Life, no 10, 1948, by WB Turrill). A puffball discovered under an oak tree in Kent during the war was so big that it was assumed to be a secret German weapon (Mushrooms and Toadstools no 7, 1953, by John Ramsbottom, keeper of mycology at the Natural History Museum). The stories are never gratuitous, and they proved magnets for the lay reader (I confess I bought Mushrooms and Toadstools - my first NN volume - precisely to mine it for such gothic tales). But as you read through the volumes the anecdotes begin to stand out, with a vivacity often absent from the more important scientific sections. The biological skin of Britain was being laid out and anatomised with minute assiduousness and the very latest understanding, but it felt more like an autopsy than an adventure in field science. The British wildwood was demythologised, the old folktale of the woodcock carrying its young about in flight confirmed, the fritillaries were still flowering in Magdalen Meadow at Oxford. An entire Cheshire parish is shown pickled in the 19th century in AW Boyd's exquisitely strange A Country Parish (no 9, 1951). All was well and known. A very British enterprise in certainty and dispassion was under way.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/mar/14/new-naturalist-books-richard-mabey

[Ben Kenobi]

regexellent

I have a good friend that I grew up with that left.

[Ben Kenobi]

I'm not that far from the center of apolyton.

[molly bloom]

Anyway, Robert Mugabe is responsible for the genocide of 20,000 Matabele,

Which took place between 1982 and 1986, and was firstly directed against the supporters of his political opponent, Joshua Nkomo.

the mass exodus of the whites (who held the wealth and experience needed to keep the economy going)

And who had also been instrumental in keeping the majority black population in servitude since the declaration of U.D.I. . The whites had voted for the right wing Rhodesian Front in 1962 (as opposed to the more liberal United Federal Party), had cooperated with the apartheid regime in South Africa (allowing at least 4000 South African troops to be stationed in Rhodesia in 1973; more in 1974) and the Renamo guerillas in Mozambique.

Why did the whites have the wealth & experience to 'keep the economy going' as you blandly put it ? Because 250 000 whites concentrated the power and wealth in their hands, rather than share it with 4 million black Africans:

I have faithfully followed the Huggins-Welensky line for over twenty-five years. But at the next election, I shall be asked to vote away the Europeans' long-standing protection against their swamping by hordes of primitive people, and agree to having them live next door to me and attending school with my children. This I cannot do... call it prejudice if you will but however liberal-minded we are, (!) we can never cease to shrink from close and intimate contact with the Africans.

A supporter of the Rhodesian Front, in a letter to The Citizen, November 2 1962.

The R.F. government from its inception used the familiar methods of repression: police violence in the African 'townships', banning of the political parties represented by Joshua Nkomo and Ndabaningi Sithole, the placing of both these men under restriction without trial, and eventually forcing the opposition into exile in neighbouring countries and into armed rebellion, because as they saw it, there were no methods of legal redress against the illegal regimes of first Field, and then Smith.

...despite an abundance of excellent arable land.

? One third of the country is the Low Veld, an area below 2000 feet, with the common infestations of tsetse fly and malaria, and with unpredictable rainfall patterns.

The High Veld (averaging 4000-5000 feet in elevation) benefits from a healthy combination of altitude, rich soil, adequate (but not plentiful) rainfall and minerals that could be profitably extracted. Unsurprisingly, the European settlers concentrated in this area, with as many black Africans as could be found employment for.

The High Veld is quite a narrow strip, and amounts to only 20% of the country's area. Even in the High Veld, rainfall (over 30ins around Harare) makes the north eastern area most suitable for crop cultivation, but in areas where the rainfall is only 25 ins or less, ranching is more important.

This is also where some of the country's more important mineral resources can be found- chrome and gold, for instance.

The Middle Veld covers an area of between 40% and 50% of the total land area, and despite it containing land that was of good quality, it was less developed than the High Veld, had poorer infrastructure and communications.

It also was home to the greatest population of rural Africans and much of it was owned by Africans.

Tobacco accounted for over a third of Rhodesia's exports (by value) in the 1960s. Tobacco, as far as I know, is not renowned as a food crop.

It amazes me that the British demanded that he be allowed to run for election in 1980.

It shouldn't. The collapse of the Portuguese dictatorship's empire in Africa meant that Rhodesia was more and more dependent upon South Africa for support- and South Africa was fighting in Angola, was occupying Namibia illegally, faced international sanctions, continuing domestic unrest, as well as opposition from the Front Line states and incursions from guerillas based in Mozambique and elsewhere.

Both the United States and the United Kingdom applied pressure to Ian Smith's government to allow free elections- the internal solution (co-option of Abel Muzorewa) preserved too many white privileges for black Rhodesians' tastes.

Heros don't blow up a pair of airliners filled with civilians; that's what terrorists do.

I imagine you're referring to the shooting down of a civilian airliner in January of 1979 with a hand-held Sam-7 missile, and the previous shooting down in 1978 of another civilian aeroplane.


Both carried out by Joshua Nkomo's Z.A.P.U.'s military wing, Z.I.P.R.A. .

Heros don't place landmines on roads designed to kill civilians and not military targets;

I take it you mean 'landmines designed to kill civilians' and not 'roads designed to kill civilians'. Did the Rhodesian military's vehicles and troops entirely eschew use of 'civilian' roads' ? I suspect not.

The kinds of things he did to black villagers to coerce them into supporting ZANLA were even more hideous, e.g. bayonetting the pregnant women of villages that refused to support him.

Presumably you mean he ordered the bayonetting of pregnant women, and didn't actually do this himself.

Before 1980 or after ? Could you give us some examples ? Just for info.

He has never stood in a fair election.

International observers agreed that despite the difficulties of holding an election in a country that had experienced years of civil war, political oppression, white emigration (yes, whites were leaving the country even before Mugabe & Nkomo returned) and the collapse of its infrastructure, the elections were free and fair and reasonably without voter intimidation.

which was a horrible mistake; Abel Muzorewa was much better.

Lacked widespread support and was tainted by cooperation with Smith's regime.

Yes, people like to shove under the rug the fact that they were totally wrong about him despite the obvious warning signs

Yes, if only people could have seen in 1979-1980 what would happen in 1982-1986 and in the 1990s.