From: matus [matus@snet.net]
Sent: Monday, July 15, 2002 11:49 PM
To: matus@snet.net
Subject: MFD List - The post-colonialist famine

(All, I have mentioned a few times previously the general attitude that the
elitist academic left has perveyed regarding the US.  The post-modernist
movement embodies a rejection of western ideals, including crazy things like
science, freedom, and rule of law.  As I mentioned in a previous article on
Cambodia, a prominent journal on foreign affairs chastised the US for
pushing its ideologies on cultures that were communist.  What right, the
author argued, did America have to push its flawed system, which contained
such things as racism, on communist nations.  Obviously lost on the author
is the degree of the problems.  As Winston Churchill said, democratic
capitalism is the worst government out there, except for all the rest.  The
liberal academic elites in the Vietnam era were making these same arguments
while millions of Vietnamese and Cambodians were being slaughtered or
starved to death.  Along with the rise in post modernism is the rise in
relativism, that is, that no one system is objectively better than any
other, that morality is a relative concept.  Ethicians would shudder at such
proclamations, pointing out that people in western industrialized worlds
live much more comfortable, healthier, and longer lives than people who are
not influenced as much by western culture.  The western ideals of freedom,
democracy, laws that apply equally to everyone, and equal rights are thought
to be merely a relative concept and no more or less valid than systems which
oppress and starve their people, force their women to remain ignorant, and
frequently abandon all civil rights.  Such is the current state of Africa,
the post-modernist movement has made it politically incorrect to actively
participate in another culture, no matter how brutal and oppressive that
culture is.  This is a wonderful article that focuses on the effect in
Zimbabwe, where millions face starvation while the government shuts down
farms because their inhabitants are white descendants of colonialists.  -
Mike)

Robert W. Tracinski


The post-colonialist famine


http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com | Today, more than a million people in
Zimbabwe are starving, and up to three million face the imminent prospect
of starvation. This has not yet excited much attention in the West.
Zimbabwe, after all, is far away from the centers of American interest; all
of our top reporters are in Kandahar and Karachi.

But this case is important, not because of any direct effect it may have on
the United States, but because it is a pure, distilled example of the
larger trend that is destroying the world: the West's loss of moral
confidence.

That loss of confidence is codified in the doctrines of the academic left.
The same folks who brought us "postmodernism" and "multiculturalism"
brought us another variation on the same theme: "post-colonialism." In
today's academic code words, "post-" really means "anti-."
"Post-colonialism" is the theory that every evil in the world is caused by
Western powers trying to assert control over non-Western countries. More
fundamentally, the post-colonialists condemn any attempt by the West to
assert the superiority of our ideals -- narrow notions like individual
rights and the rule of law -- over the primitive way of life of "indigenous
peoples."

Everything that is happening in Zimbabwe is being done in full accord with
the doctrines of post-colonialism.

If every evil is caused by colonialism, then the heart of the problem must
be the colonists themselves. In Zimbabwe, that means thousands of white
British farmers who settled in Zimbabwe's sparsely populated countryside
and built a prosperous agricultural economy. The settler's use of Western
agricultural techniques, combined with the benefits of British law and
order, made Zimbabwe into the breadbasket of southern Africa, an exporter
of grain on which all of its neighbors relied. But in accordance with
leftist philosophy, Zimbabwe's post-colonial ruler, Robert Mugabe,
denounced the white farmers and hatched a scheme for "land reform."

In the language of tin-pot dictatorships, "reform" means "theft." For
years, Mugabe has allowed armed gangs to occupy white-owned farms,
sometimes murdering the owners, as a precursor to a plan to seize the
farms, allegedly for redistribution to poor blacks. (In reality, the farms
are going to Mugabe's cronies.)

The result? People are starving in Zimbabwe, not because there is a
drought, but because hundreds of thousands of acres of crops have not been
planted. Some farms are fallow because they are occupied by armed thugs.
Others are unused because of a law threatening white farmers with two years
in prison if they plant without government permission, which has not been
given. Other farms are unplanted simply because no one in his right mind
would go to the trouble of planting crops that will be seized before he can
harvest them.

When you make war on the farmers, what can you expect but famine?

Mugabe's justification for this disastrous policy is pure post-colonialism:
"Land, being the most important natural resource of any country, must
belong to . . . the indigenous people." This is also, you might have
noticed, an explicit policy of racism: whites must have their farms seized
because they are not black.

Now Mugabe is following the playbook of history's more ruthless dictators:
using famine to liquidate his political opposition. But he is going one
better by getting the United Nations to help him starve his opponents. Here
is how Shari Eppel, the director of the African civil-rights group Amani
Trust, describes the process: "International food donors are setting up
feeding centers aimed at destitute families, but once the donors have moved
on, the bullies move in and decide who gets fed and who doesn't." Even the
relatives and children of opposition supporters are condemned to starvation.

How can the United Nations allow this? The U.N. and its Western donors are
just playing along with the post-colonialist ground rules. The West is
supposed to regard Africa's poverty as the product of our evil
interference, never mind the facts. So it's our duty to send buckets of
money and food -- but we are not supposed to enforce any rules on how the
money is spent or how the food is distributed, because that kind of control
would, after all, be colonialism.

In the middle of the famine he created, Mugabe had the effrontery this week
to attend a U.N.-sponsored World Food Summit in Rome. There,
representatives from African nations dined lavishly while they blamed their
famines on the West's failure to give more aid.

Welcome to the "post-colonialist" world, where Third World dictators blame
the West for their sins. The West caves in -- and lets the dictators keep
on sinning.
--

www.matus1976.com - Article archives