Comments on: Zimbabwe – A Bizarre Process

By: Artfldgr

Artfldgr — Tue, 06 May 2008 17:32:14 +0000

http://www.politicsweb.co.za/politicsweb/view/politicsweb/en/page71619?oid=88163&sn=Detail

Bram Fischer and Geoffrey Coxâ€™s journey into the Soviet heart of darkness.

On 2nd April this year one of the greatest British journalists of the last century died in England, aged nearly 98: a man whose life throws the light of truth on a central problem of the political culture of southern Africa, the problem of Communism. This problem of Communism is in turn central to the dictatorship in Zimbabwe, the sordid farce of its electoral system, collusion with this dictatorship by the government of South Africa under President Thabo Mbeki and the humiliating spectacle of the leaders of the Southern African Development Community in a phalanx of agreement with President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe: their old and young grey heads as fixed and corpse-like as the Politburo of Soviet Communist Party lined up on Lenin’s tomb in Moscow in the days of yore.
This political culture was set in place in southern Africa primarily by white people, not by black people. It is one of the shining virtues of the life of Sir Geoffrey Cox that he provided clear and truthful witness to the Big Lie on which this culture was founded, tangled up as it is in a brave, heroic contribution to the ending of apartheid. Two lives are joined here, as if fused at the hip: Sir Geoffrey Cox (1910-2008), the founder of modern television news journalism in Britain (a beacon of integrity, by contrast with the permanently shameful role of the South African Broadcasting Corporation), and Bram Fischer QC (1908-1975), chairman of the illegal South African Communist Party and principal defence counsel in the Rivonia Trial in which Nelson Mandela and his colleagues were sentenced to life imprisonment in 1964, who died as a political prisoner nine years into a life sentence in South Africa, more than thirty years before Cox..

By: Artfldgr

Artfldgr — Tue, 06 May 2008 17:02:11 +0000

and who supplies the regime with weapons and expertise and advice?

communists… oh, yeah… they dont exist anymore…

thats why a ship full of weapons was turned away… the iraq war with things in georgia and ajerbaijan make it tough to transport over land, the preffered route.

africa is a country that if allowed to get its resources on the open market would then cause the value of raw materials from russia to go way down in value.

raw materials value can only be increased two ways. when the material is scarce, or made scarce by destabilization preventing market.

russia requires, since it doenst manufacture much, a high destabilization to maximize profits. if china helps, they get a discount on raw materials they need.

of course, if iran falls, then there is no land bridge for any of this stuff to be shipped and in a short time, these destabilizing things will be much less as they use up material and cant get replacements. (this converts what little wealth they do get, into arms money, and guess who the worlds largest arms dealers are? russia. how convenient).

mugabe is not an indipendent… and he is not on the western plan.. so who are his keepers? the regimes that have done what to their own people (and still do)?

The great strength of Mitrokhin’s archive is that it reveals the extent to which the KGB was willing to exploit the third world in its confrontation with the West during the cold war. All too often this has been overlooked by US and British historians, but many of Africa’s problems today were exacerbated by cold war rivalries as the continent became a proxy for the nuclear stand-off. When the Gold Coast became the first of Britain’s colonies to become independent, as Ghana in 1957, it was quickly targeted by Moscow. It helped that its first ruler, Kwame Nkrumah, was intent on creating a one-party state along Marxist-Leninist lines and was susceptible to Soviet and East German influence. A pattern began to develop. KGB agents played on his paranoia of CIA assassination attempts, helped by the widely held perception that the US was a racist society – the evidence coming from the segregation in the southern states and the violence surrounding the civil rights movement.

Much of the activity was infantile but it was effective. African politicians at the United Nations were sent racially abusive letters signed by white supremacists but forged by KGB agents, national airlines were supplied with Soviet aircraft which sooner or later had to be grounded and there were endless grandiose aid projects which never worked. In Guinea, the airport at Conakry was gifted a fleet of snow ploughs which gradually disintegrated under the African sun. All this might not have mattered and could be written off as a view of history written by Evelyn Waugh, but the Soviets also poured money and arms into the many civil conflicts which broke out in the aftermath of the end of empire.

Not that it always went smoothly. During the Rhodesian conflict of the 1970s the Soviets backed Joshua Nkomo instead of the more likely candidate, Robert Mugabe.

The reason for doing this had nothing to do with backing winners – Nkomo was hardly ideologically sound – but everything to do with perception. At the time the Soviet Union had fallen out in a big way with China and Mugabe had blotted his copybook by describing himself as “a Marxist-Leninist of Maoist thought”, a black mark as far as Moscow was concerned. This is the kind of detail which makes Mitrokhin’s papers so fascinating. If Mugabe had kept his peace about his political inclinations, he was clearly Moscow’s man. As it was, Nkomo was later imprisoned and his KGB-backed Zimbabwe African People’s Union was rendered impotent by internal bickering.

By: big downer

big downer — Tue, 06 May 2008 08:10:57 +0000

Sir:

It appears from your post that you are still in Zimbabwe. In addition, I am assuming from the avatar (photo) that you are white or you have a strange sense of humor. If any of these observations are correct; then I defer to your courage and brass balls for not only staying there but for speaking your mind under these volatile conditions. About the same guts a Jew would have writing an editorial against the National Socialists in 1939 Nazi Germany.

Please know that many of us in the USA, specifically where I am (California) are waking up to what is happening in your country – too bad there’s no oil in Zimbabwe – if there was Mugabe would suffer the same fate as Saddam – still, Mugabe should take heed…you piss off the Americans and you pay a heavy price- Manuel Noriega, Colonel Gaddafi, Saddam , Milosevic , Charles Taylor , Idi Amin… like Mugabe they too thought they were untouchable. Big mistake.

We are watching with great interest – you are not alone in this fight. Carry on. Mugabe and his Zanu-PF thugs will fall – and they will face severe retribution. Lest anyone think America and the U.K are soft or merciful I suggest they brush up on their history – see Nuremberg Trials.

Excelsior!

A friend from the states.