Tuesday, July 01, 2008

Ignoramus takes on evil tyrant

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/06/28/do2801.xml

I bought the Telegraph for the first time in ages yesterday, and was confirmed yet again in my belief that it has become a cross between Heat and the Daily Mirror. It gave Hugo Chavez a sympathetic write-up and there were many articles about various celebrity shite-for-brains. The Telegraph of old is dead; long live the Telegraph.

This huffery and puffery from Simon Heffer sounds like a typical Colonel Blimp sound-off, but it isn't. There are a number of crucial mistakes in it which lead me to believe that apart from a couple of names, Mr Heffer doesn't know anything specific about Zimbabwe.

Viz, 'Sanctions on his country merely starve those who disagree with [Mugabe]'. Er, there aren't any blanket sanctions on Zimbabwe... just a few targeted sanctions against ZANU (PF) high-ups. The starvation is caused by the complete failure of commercial agriculture (read white farmers), and the use of international (read United States) food aid as a political weapon.

'How proud does the Left, with its stupidly romantic notions of the inviolate nature of "black freedom fighters", feel about what it has so ably helped Mugabe achieve?' That almost completely reverses the actual case. Who was the British leader most photographed with Mugabe, with whom he got on best? Margaret Thatcher. Who was the British leader Mugabe hated because he had a government of gays? Tony Blair. I know this is all a bit counter-intuitive, but it is true. While the lefty morons did spend an awful lot of time in the '70s bigging up all the communist insurgents in Africa (or freedom fighters as they quaintly called them), since then they have almost universally forgotten about and ignored them. They certainly haven't leant any fig-leaves of legitimacy to regimes like Mugabes. Tony Blair and Jack Straw sounded off about Mugabe on a regular basis, not that they are really lefties.

'Frankly, I couldn't care less who liberates Zimbabwe - North Korea, the Taliban or Venezuela are welcome to it: they couldn't be any worse than the incumbent.'

Really? Mugabe may be a detestable dictator, but in world terms he is very small beer. He has directly murdered perhaps 30,000, and by neglect perhaps another 100,000. By the murderous standards of the 20th century, that doesn't even put him in the top fifty murderous dictators. I would love to see Mugabe and his circle of military, political and security services cronies put into the dustbin of history, but lets try to get a little perspective here. The Chinese Communist junta are responsible for way more deaths than that- where is Mr Heffers calls for China to be invaded?

The fact that we are still within thirty years of the end of white rule in Zimbabwe means that even moderately young people have a personal link to that time. To think that an invasion of Zimbabwe by the British army would not be genuinely and legitimately controversial is just dumb. And the UN doesn't do invasions. It may have given its imprimatur to the invasion of Iraq back in 1991, but it didn't arrange it and control the forces. Real high commands have to do that stuff.

'I know what a shock it must be to Leftists of all parties, with their uncritical adoration of African leaders from the saintly, such as Nelson Mandela, to the repulsive, such as Mugabe, to see that sometimes black people can be evil too. But that is the truth.' No, really? What a banal observation. Can Indians be evil too? Or is it just white people and black people?

How is it that people like Simon Heffer get their views into the paper? Especially when they have nothing of note to say about issues they obviously don't know anything about...

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