Mugged by Mugabe: The Left & Its Pet Monsters

The Texas Mercury ^ | August 2002 | James Versluys

[sourcery]

The crazy people at the World Socialist Website have published a rather foolish article in their latest issue about Zimbabwe’s looming famine.  Lawd, oh, lawdy, it’s fun stuff, interesting both for its purity of ideological agenda and its excellence in illustrating exactly how corrupting an influence radical leftist thought is these days.  Noam Chomsky was right to say modern leftism amounted to puerile fantasies, but what he neglected to mention was the pure corruption of thought—which is where the organs like the Nation and World Socialist Website come in. Go ahead.  Read articles on the same subjects from these supposedly differing places on the Left.  If you put two articles side by side without the authors names would you be able to tell the magazines apart?

In recent memory alone, we can see that the Left generally responds to socialistically oriented thugs in one of two manners, and this applies for a number of cases around the globe. Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia, Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, and Fidel Castro in Cuba have been the most prominent beneficiaries of these two responses. The first response is to ignore the crisis at hand, be it mass murder in the case of Milosevic (which the Left did for years), or in the case of Zimbabwe, deliberately created mass starvation. The second response is to make absolutely absurd excuses for obvious slaughter and general nastiness. Someone will note the somewhat incongruous nature of those two thoughts.

Both reactions are interesting because of the stupefying effects they have on the supposed ethical basis of leftism: concern for the desperate and helpless being a general mantra at the center of the general category known as "the Left". This WSW article is noteworthy simply for the baldness and openness of the lie, with the Chris Talbot fellow apparently believing the dictum that the bigger the lie, the easier it is to pull off.

The central logic of the argument isn't even shoddy, it's a flat lie, and child's play to prove wrong. "Land reform was a response to this developing economic crisis, rather than the cause of it." An idiot could argue this to pieces—as everyone even vaguely related to the country knows, the "war heroes" that displaced the skilled black workforce immediately destroyed the productivity and crops of all the farms they fatuously claim to have "liberated". Farm productivity was instantly destroyed by moving squatters on the land, who immediately stopped the farming process, stole the crops yet to be ready for harvest, and sold off the farm equipment off as scrap metal instead of valuable farming implements. The failure of the economy was in direct and immediate proportion to how many farms had gone through this sickly named "liberation" process. This also created an instant population of 500,000 workers and their families with no place to stay, skilled and valuable workers, but also men without the brushman survival skills of the nomadic Zimbabweans, and thus uniquely unable to feed themselves and their families. The economic situation went from a mere difficulty in the recent past to immediate cataclysmic crisis in the span of mere months, and Zimbabwe has become an entire order of magnitude worse than it was just two years ago.

 Mr. Talbot’s implication that the IMF and World Bank are to blame is preposterous. Outrageous military expenditures and the outright theft of lender and central bank money by Mugabe's family bankrupted the system, not IMF restrictions. $100 million flew out of Zimbabwe in June of 1998 alone, right into European and South American banks, money that Mugabe's family and cronies used to go partying at a number of hot, happening spots and beaches. One hundred million in one month in a country with a mere $24-billion economy is two buckets of cash, people. Hell, it's a lot of money in any economy. Arthur Anderson is a piker compared to this guy Mugabe. But when Anderson stole all that money, it was screwing with the lives of a few thousand people, people who could get jobs. Mugabe fucked up a country with 11 million people in it.

So, why is the Left doing this? What is the thread that runs through Milosevic and Castro and Mugabe that they're not reviled endlessly like Pinochet?

They're all socialists. Not that you hear this out of the mainstream press, but all three of these tidy chaps once held the title of “Great Hope of Mankind”, and all of them were, in times past, feted by the upper crust of the American and European Left as the next best thing since socialized bread. Castro wasn't some hack Stalinist living on the whim of the Politburo, he was a modern progressive like you and me. Milosevic, in the early 90s, was hailed as "A new breed of socialist, that can guide a transition from the politics of old" (Nation magazine), meaning he could keep leftism going as another form of leftism collapsed.

Mugabe was the most praised and loved of all. In the early 1980s, all the lefty media and Hollywood stars would go over and tell him how peachy it was that our kind of guy was getting in to office. He was universally considered a social democrat leftist, the "uniter, not a divider" type.

I even agreed with some of the 'Left' ideas that failed here. Land reform is a good idea in certain circumstances. But even in the best of circumstances it can be implemented poorly. Zimbabwe wasn't only in bad circumstances, but it was implemented horribly on top of it, compounding a needlessly wasteful project with an almost bone stupid process. Land reform wasn't even a good idea for Zimbabwe to begin with because the economy rested on a few large cash crops such as tobacco and wheat. Any land reform would have been complicated by an economy resting on commodity imports from cash crop expenditures.

Instead of explaining this complication, the ideologues are so frightened to see any of their ideas and people fail that they're creating phantasms, lying freely and without shame. This corruption is the predictable and logical outcome of a philosophical system of politics that rests on the assumptions of equality, an idea that is not so much an idea as a faith, and one that looks very much like a religious faith.

As such, you don't hear much about Mugabe the “socialist reformer” anymore, nor do you ever hear labels like "radical dictator" or "extreme leftist" applied to him.  All this despite the direct help and hope put into Mugabe’s regime by the Left everywhere; the past ideological ties that would be brought up endlessly with someone like Pinochet are not to be found, ever, in any of these discussions of the regime—even the articles defending him no longer claim him as "one of us." But you can rest assured the people writing these absurdist defenses know damned good and well who and what Robert Mugabe is.

[backhoe]

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[xJones]

Zimbabwe wasn't only in bad circumstances, but it was implemented horribly on top of it, compounding a needlessly wasteful project with an almost bone stupid process.

I disagree. There was nothing "almost" about it, this has been the biggest piece of deliberatly engineered genocide and it's just getting started. It's a real pity that Pol Pot's marxist destruction of almost half of the Cambodian population occurred before the internet. But we get to watch Mugabe's marxist destruction of Zimbabwe, and he won't get away with it like his predecessors. The times, they are a changing. .