Why Rhodesia Fought
And We Must Too.
I recently stumbled back across an old video from the Rhodesian Bush War, in which a Rhodesian soldier explains why he is fighting. Doing so, he simply points to the seemingly uncontroversial nature of the Rhodesian system—a Christian, capitalist, Western one—and how he is willing to fight and die for such a system because it is what separates his country from the rest of the Dark Continent.
“Yes, I’m fighting to preserve a way of life, to maintain a home, to live in this country generally, under what I consider to be an acceptable system, which is basically Christian and capitalistic. If the rest of Africa is an example of the alternatives to this particular system, and if that is what communism represents in general, then I’m going to be against it …until the day I finally go.”
It’s a short clip, and there’s not much else to it—though of course the brush stroke camouflage and unique Rhodesian accent make it a pleasure to watch and listen to.
But it must be noted that it does capture the Rhodesian argument for why they had to embark upon their Unilateral Declaration of Independence and fight to the bitter end against the race communists across the world.
They fought America, including both the nominally conservative Kissinger and openly leftist Jimmy Carter. They fought conservative and Labour regimes in Britain. They fought Mugabe, and his backers in the People’s Republic of China and North Korea. They fought Nkomo, and his backers in the Soviet Union. They fought FRELIMO after it took over Mozambique, and even fought the MPLA and the Cuban communists in Angola. And they were betrayed by the South Africans, in the end, which did them in.
All of that, for what? Were they trying to establish fascism on the continent? Institute slavery? Crown Ian Smith as a modern-day Caesar and unleash him on their neighbors? No, no, and no. Rhodesia didn’t even have an apartheid system.
Rather, the problem was that Rhodesia refused to bend to the times and adopt an egalitarian system, as I have discussed before. It refused to operate on the false assumption that all men are equally capable, and thus equally deserving of the ability to vote. Instead, it realized that maintenance of its Christian, capitalist, Western system in the face of rising decolonization movements both in its neighborhood and around the globe would mean limiting the franchise so as to ensure the continuation of Responsible Government.
Responsible Government and the propertied voting system that supported it were nothing radical. It was merely the way America operated before the Age of Jackson, or Britain before the Third Reform Act: it was landed voting with very modest property thresholds so as to ensure the most incapable were not capable of voting. To participate in the stewardship of the nation and its prosperity, they would have to first steward themselves.
Further, they had plenty of evidence that it was the only sane way to operate in Africa. Kenya had been the most pleasant state in Africa for the British settlers, and then gone to pot as soon as the country was handed over to the former Mau Maus. Uganda was ruled by a cannibal once the imperial government pulled out. The Congo became a living hell within moments of the Belgians leaving. The Gold Coast returned to being a living hell as soon as the British left and it became Ghana.
Everywhere that majority rule was tried, in short, it led to utter disaster.
The Rhodesians understood this, and sought to avoid it.
They warned the egalitarian West of the consequences of handing a prosperous country to politically inexperienced natives unaccustomed to any political process outside of the tribe, much less mass democracy.1 They pointed to the violent actions that communist groups like ZAPU were already committing against other blacks.2 They pointed to the hell the Congo had turned into as soon as it lost its version of Responsible Government.3 They noted that they, unlike the post-colonial regimes, were honest gentlemen rather than corrupt kleptocrats.4 They welcomed the opinions of tribal chiefs—who generally got along quite well with Ian Smith and his type of man—and noted that the chiefs were not on the side of decolonization.5 And they pointed to the fact that they both had built civilization out of nothing in a mere 60 years, and had no apartheid system.6
But nobody cared. They didn’t even care when the rebels started raping and murdering white nuns.7 The Rhodesians wouldn’t go along with complete and total equality that would destroy their world and everything in it. As Baxter puts it, “Wilson, of course, hated Smith because he was an imperialist and a racist.” Similarly, as JRT Wood notes in So Far and No Further!, “The truth was that, nothing short of conceding universal suffrage would satisfy either the British Government or its most influential corps of officials in Whitehall.” As America and the (openly) communist powers agreed, that meant Rhodesia wouldn’t be recognized.
The best telling of this comes from Peter Baxter. As he puts it in his Rhodesia: A Complete History:
as Smith was apt to remark, there was more freedom in Rhodesia than anywhere in Black Africa. This was undoubtedly true, and indeed, Wilson was forced to appease some of the most brutal and disreputable men of his times. Rhodesia existed under the rule of law, without a whiff of corruption, and independence had been achieved without a single burning barricade, shot fired or drop of blood shed. With very few exceptions, this was not the case anywhere north of the Zambezi, but it did not matter. Under current democratic norms, it was the right of the majority to rule, and if that resulted inevitably in the looting and destruction of the nation, then so be it.
This was unacceptable. As Baxter puts it, “Southern Rhodesians were willing to be as pragmatic as necessary, so long as the final solution did not affect their enjoyment of the ‘Rhodesian Way of Life’.” That is, they would try to reason with the increasingly insane and delusional world—but not to the point of letting it find a way that feeding themselves to the wolves would be reasonable. That they would never agree to.
Further, as Ron Morkel notes in Rhodesia: From Beginning to End, the Rhodesians had no “home” to which they could return. They were Rhodesians, not Brits in Rhodesia.8 To see their world destroyed in the name of equity by Britain, America, and the communist bloc, all of which were intent on making such a horrid thing occur, would mean the total destruction of everything they held dear, a Rhodesian Ragnarok not unlike the disaster seen in the Congo.
And so the Rhodesians decided they had to fight. Thus came the Unilateral Declaration of Independence, and 15 years of war against the world in the desperate belief that their “Christian and capitalist” system, as the soldier put it to the media, could be preserved. They expected the fight to be bitter and long, as indeed it was.
They knew the risks, and the many opportunities for failure. But to them, staking their future upon themselves and fighting was better than ignominiously going quietly into that good night. And so they fought.
We’re All Rhodesians Now
I have been thinking much about this lately, particularly in the context of the John Brown left.
It too hates us because we are inegalitarian. It preaches hatred of whites, revels in anti-white crime, cheers the story of Haiti, and argues that an even more brutal and violent form of Reconstruction should have been imposed on the South.
It references that history not because it cares about history, but because it wants to repeat what was done in Haiti or what was inflicted upon the South—another holdout state that decided to resist such horrors rather than meekly go along with them.
It wants to stomp out anything that is not utterly egalitarian, reduce every form of natural hierarchy to rubble, and to wage war on the beautiful, the industrious, and the excellent for the crime of existing. Its spirit is that of the favela crushing Chatsworth, forever.
It has done so since the French Revolution, to be sure. It is the ideology not just of Mugabe and those who supported him, but of all such leftist revolutions we have seen. It is the spirit behind the Soviets peeling the white skin off the hands of the former Guards officers to mock in their pain the uniformed, white-gloved excellence of aesthetics and spirit for which they were once known as they served the Tsars, and that of the Simbas in the Congo torturing nuns to death, much as the Spanish communists had done thirty years before.
But now it is here. Whether the Brutalism of our buildings, the crime in our cities, or the disparate impact laws that have made it increasingly difficult for whites to get good jobs…we have the race communism here now. ZAPU and ZANU are at the doors. Sure, they call themselves “democratic socialism,” “Antifa,” “John Brown Gun Clubs,” or something else of that sort.
But it’s the same thing, with the same intentions. They want to destroy our civilization, and like Nkomo will laugh as they commit atrocities against us.
Such is the situation Rhodesia faced. It decided—after much prudent deliberation and years of laying the groundwork—to fight. The question is whether we will too, and what that will mean if we do. Or, if we, like all those neighborhoods across America destroyed by the fledgling versions of this in the 1960s, will just go quietly into that good night…and let civilization slip away.
Of course, prudence is important as well. The lack of it doomed the Fireeaters, and attacking rebel strongholds in Mozambique and Zambia was largely counter-productive for the Rhodesians, for it gave the South Africans a reason to abandon them. Playing the heel, going berserk, or otherwise acting out of emotion rather than prudence is never effective, and is often exceedingly counterproductive.
Fortunately, right now, we have a chance of solving this in a prudent and practicable way: using the state as a scalpel to scrape away the cancer. There is much that could be and should be done to smash away the pillars supporting the John Brown left.
Actually ending (rather than just no longer enforcing) disparate impact law, and punishing companies that continue to discriminate against white and American workers could be done tomorrow, and would be a huge blow to the left’s economic base by taking away those programs that give it free jobs.
Similarly, investigating and auditing leftist NGOs would be hugely useful, and further demolish the economic and social power base of the John Brown Left.
Antifa/JBGC/etc. are domestic terrorists, and must be treated as such; each and every such group must be entirely liquidated, and their supporters, donors, non-profits, and so on obliterated and locked away.
Hart-Celler must be repealed, and the birthright citizens deported after birthright citizenship is ended.
None of that is easy. These problems are deeply set, and will be monumentally challenging to address.
Nevertheless, they can and must be addressed. Now is the time to address them. That the government did not do so after John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry is much of why the South went to war: it saw those who wanted to extinguish it as being protected. That must not be allowed to again occur, and indeed those enemies of civilization against whom we are arrayed must be entirely crushed.