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I really appreciate all the support everyone's giving me, and
I hope to expand the show even more than it
already has. Thank you so much. I want to welcome
everyone back to the Pekingona Show. Will Tanner is here. Hey,
doing well, doing well? What about you doing good man?
First time on the show. Tell everybody a little bit
about yourself.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So I just graduated from law school the spring,
which is why I've been pretty quiet on the internet
up till now. I just busy hitting the books so
and then through that I've kind of been working in
digital marketing and on the Internet for a while now
started speaking out more on Twitter. It happened to have
a thread on Rhodesia Go New Clear and take off
and get it, I think up now we're almost up
to eight million views on it, which was fun. Back
sometime August, I think, and since then just kind of
been writing about that sort of thing on Twitter and
on my sub stack, and yeah, mainly focus on European
life up till the Guns of August in nineteen fourteen,
and then also on decolonization in the sixties and seventies.
Got my two areas I enjoy writing.
Speaker 1: About cool Well, I mean, I invited you to come
on to talk about Rhodisha give an overview, So I
guess where to start. How did you get in? How
did you get interested in the topic?
Speaker 2: I have a pretty tangled backstory getting into it, probably
not one of the normal ways. But when I was
like ten, I found a book about Eric Prince in
my local Barnes and Noble and thought it was just
the coolest thing and he was the coolest guy. And
through him I found out about Soldier of Fortune magazine,
and around the time I was getting interested in all that.
The guy who founded it, I believe, Robert Brown, wrote
an autobiography called Dancing with Devils, and in it he
tells this awesome story about smuggling guns Drohodesia through his
local small town airport because he knew the guy who
had handled baggage. So he just smiled away to the
guy and sneak into Rhodesia a couple of Duffel bags
full of Ruger Mini fourteens and banana bags for him
and hand him out to the Rhodesian farmers when he
got in country. And so I thought that was pretty
cool and just kind of had it lurking in the
back of my mind, and then eventually discovered Prime Minister
Ian Smith's autobiography, which is called The Great Betrayal. It
was reprinted as Bitter Harvest in the early two thousands,
and it's about his struggle against really the entirety of
the West and the entirety of the Communist Block to
make Rhodesia independent. And I'd forget how I stumbled across that,
but more or less accidentally, and through reading it kind
of remembered what I'd heard from Brown about fighting the
Communist rebels. And then looking at it through Smith's eye,
was able to see how the West got involved, and
that really sparked interest, and I started reading more about it,
various memoirs, autobiographies, that sort of thing.
Speaker 1: Well, do you mind if we start off talking about
the fact that Rhodesia is named after Cecil Roads and
that even though we love Rhodesia, we don't love Cecil Roads.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I'm more ambivalent towards him than a lot of
people are. The Pioneer column, which is how it was started.
He funded the British South Africa Company and sent a
column of men into Rhodesia to found it, and it
was a pretty cool experiment, and that it was very
selective as to who they took on board. It wasn't
the typical sort of freebooter adventurers that you find in
these stories, but was really the second sons of the
British gentry, and that was kind of the immigration policy
Rhodesia had moving forward, was the best men. And so
that's where the Cecil Roads connection comes in. Was the
founding of it. As I'm sure everyone listening is, he's
one of the big proponents of the British Empire, and
there are a lot of mixed views of him online.
I'm more ambivalent towards him because I see the British
Empire as a civilizing force. But also I can see
why a lot of people dislike him and dislike it well.
Speaker 1: I think a lot of it also has to deal
with a lot of his writings were picked up by
people that we would call globalists and used for those purposes. Also,
when I was growing up, I was taught that, you know,
if you're a Rhodes scholar, that's something special. And then
we find out that most Rhodes scholars are globalists scum.
Speaker 2: Yes, the few Rhodes scholars I know are just awful
and very much not what I would want. I think
he wasn't quite like that. He wanted the Rhodes Scholarship
to be the best man being u and brought into
British aristocratic culture and somewhat like the Ford Foundation, that's
gone downhill since he died, which is quite sad.
Speaker 1: So talk about the founding of Rhodesia to get into
how this, you know, how this the colony, you know,
this white colony in Black Africa it started.
Speaker 2: It's really interesting because it's a flash to flash back
to the past in a lot of ways. It was
so just to keep in mind as I describe it,
it was a private colony up until nineteen twenties. Until
the nineteen twenties, meaning it was run entirely by the
British South Africa Company as a private experiment, somewhat like
Jamestown originally was or the raj under the East India Company,
which is interesting. But so in eighteen nineties, the British
Empire was reaching at zenith and Rhodes is one of
his many projects. Wanted to build a railway from Cape
Town to Cairo, and to do that he needed the
middle part of Africa. The British needed the middle part
of Africa. But also the government was getting somewhat tired
of the expenditures of having to try and colonize and
settle and civilize the entire world, so it wasn't particularly
interested in marching into the veilt and trying to carve
civilization out of just grassland inhabited by subsistence farmers. So
Roads had to do it individually and more or less
without permission from the government. It was just a private initiative,
so over a couple of years he banded together what
was called the Pioneer, and it was a collection of
men from England largely. It wasn't South African, and that
it wasn't Boor, it wasn't Dutch. It was English, largely
the sons of the gentlemen of England. So they were
educated their gentlemen, and they weren't just a rogues gallery
like Andrew Jackson's Defense Force of New Orleans. And they
marched north under the banner of the British South Africa Company,
which despite being called the South Africa Company, was in
charge of Rhodesia, not South Africa, and did so quite successfully.
What they found in Rhodesia was, as anyone who's read
the Allan Quaterman books, which is based on Courtney Cellis,
will remember, it was largely uninhabited. There were a few
subsistence farmers in the area, pastoralists, agriculturalists, but essentially living
in the Stone Age, with no wheels, no technology, no
buildings of note. It was uninhabited except for just a
few huts and cows and such. So they settled it
and did so quite successfully. It became a booming area
of the Empire that was quite agriculturally successful because unlike England,
there were no large costs of enclosure. They could just
start farming these huge tracts of land. So you hear
about dukes getting tired of the death duties in England
buying say ten twenty thousand acres just at the drop
of a hat in Rhodesia in farming it quite successfully
and not having to deal with all the nonsense that
was going on in England. So that's somewhat the role
it took on was this place for people to go
who wanted to have large estates and farm them well
without having to put up with nonsense. And it grew
because of that, and the area was quite fertile once
they started farming it well using modern implements, and it
grew successfully. They served in World War One, fighting bravely
in the trenches, but it was still pretty small at
that point so it wasn't really that many men. And
then in nineteen twenty the British South Africa Company let
it devolve to local self rule rather than company rule.
Speaker 1: So if you, yeah, once you start having self rule
and it becomes decentralized basically, So how does the steep
centralization affect the culture the people.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so two big things. One is that immigration policy wise,
they didn't want the very poor moving there. They didn't
want to be somewhere like Australia was where criminals were
deported there. They wanted to maintain British society at its best.
They also didn't want a bunch of reprobates like traveled
to Kenya and just kind of had swinger a couple
orgies and just Kenya was kind of a disaster zone
for the reprobates of the Empire Rhodesia. They wanted the
gentlemen who were successful farmers and were going to do
a good job, but also not just be poor looking
for welfare type situation. So they had a selective immigration
policy and maintained that through the sixties, at which point
they just needed men and started trying to dragging everyone
from the West. But so for forty years they had
a very restrictive immigration policy and we're looking for second
sons and that sort of thing. The Duke of Mantros
moved there and became a political force. Secondly, they had
to decide how to run the government because though originally
there were a few native Africans in the country. They
grew tremendously once there was Western hospitals, much more food,
better agricultural practices. All that. There were quite good relations
between the natives and Rhodesians, but they were still uneducated
and as Ian Smith later said, unable to rule themselves.
They needed a perternneless hand if they were going to
live well, which the Rhodesians one of them too. So
instead of having a mass democracy like at that time
was transforming England after the Parliament Bill or was President
America Sincetrackson, Really they went with the old system of
landed voting and landed democracy where you could vote and
it was a parliament. It was a normal Western legislature,
but instead of everyone voting, it was only those with
the requisite amount of property or who later on met
certain educational criteria to show that they were intelligent, which
mainly meant it was white voters, but also the locally
successful blacks ended up voting, and there was participation through
the local tribal chiefs.
Speaker 1: What kind of relations did they have with South Africa,
I mean South Africa's at this point has been has
been around a lot longer than Rhodesia.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was mixed. Their relationship during the Bush War,
which we'll talk about later, was quite complicated because the
South Africans were trying to maintain their own system while
under similar pressure from the Western world, and so it
became standoffish. Up until then, it was somewhat mixed in
a similar way, where Rhodesia was a very Anglo culture,
they only really let in the English. There were Portuguese
or Dutch there, like in those Ambique or South Africa,
and so there was some conflict with the Dutch in
South Africa because they didn't like the apartheid system. They
saw it as unjust and not necessary compared to the
just landed democracy style system they had, and so there
was some tension on that front. But also they were
trading partners. They were close by and had pretty close
economic and commercial lands, and there's a good deal of
inflow from people who land in South Africa and move
up to Rhodesia, and both became loyal members of the
Commonwealth and Empire at least up until World War Two,
and contributed a large number of men to that war.
So again it was it was mixed. They the problem
was just a conflict of cultures. Where Rhodesia was very
Anglo civilized, aristocratic Anglo, not kind of the low culture
we have now, and that conflicted I think a good
bit with the Dutch from what I can gather. But
it also wasn't hostile. It wasn't like you know, between Germany,
East Africa and South Africa wherever. During World War One.
Speaker 1: Well, I think during the World War One series with
Thomas seven seven seven we covered talked to some about
the Boer War, but obviously didn't go extremely deep into it.
So yeah, it's all us about what happened, just.
Speaker 2: With the Boer War generally, or with as Regardssia. Yeah, okay, yeah,
So for those who don't know, it's really the Second
Boer War is what people mean when they say the
Boer War. The first one was pretty short and the
British lost it handily handedly excuse me. The second one
was much more of a large conflict because the Boers
put up a stiff fight and the British kept setting
and en list numbers of men. So y'all know that
I don't really need repeat it. At that point, Rhodesia
had only been founded in eighteen nineties. This was taking
place maybe a decade later, there weren't really a large
number of men to fight, and they were also focused
more on the commercial aspects of it. It was the British
South Africa Company rather than the British Empire. So I
haven't really read much about Rhodesian involvement in the Boer War,
and from what I gather, it's because if there was any,
it was quite small, and much more of that war
was about the invasion from the south to north rather
than any attempts to get men into Rhodesia and have
them pushed south.
Speaker 1: So how did it affect them at all? How did
it affect their growth and how.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it helped draw more resources into the area. For example,
Lord Randolph Churchill of famously visited South Africa and helped
invest and find what became the rand mines that are
famous and very wealthy today. So the Boer War was
helpful to Rhodesia and that it brought renewed British interest
and investment in the area, and also that people could
then travel up and see it and move there, build there,
invest there. All that it wasn't overly impactful as regards
to the South Africans, just because there was commercial relations
and clash of cultures. So it was, you know, kind
of like us in Mexico. I guess might be something
approaching an example, though incorrect in many respects. Just where
there's tensions, there's migration back and forth or commercial lengths.
But how did Emperor Ferdinand or Whoever's invasion in Mexico
infect us during the Civil War? Not overly much.
Speaker 1: You mentioned up until World War Two at some point,
So what is what is Rhodesia doing during the War
War two?
Speaker 2: So Ian Smith, who became the Prime Minister during the
sixties and until Rhodesia fell in seventy nine, was a
spitfire pilot in World War Two, and that was a
pretty representative example of Rhodesian service. They were excited about
war because it was their chance to participate fully in
the Empire, because during World War One had still been
the British South Africa Company. From what I gather, it
wasn't really an ideological involvement so much as they just
wanted to participate in war, somewhat like Teddy Roosevelt for example,
getting excited about the Spanish American War. The Air Force
was a big component of how they contributed because, as
I've mentioned before, it was a pretty small country. At
its maximum, it only had about two hundred and fifty
thousand whites, so they couldn't contribute division after division to
be fed in the fighting in Italy or whatever. They
did have enough men to contribute a pretty large air
force contingent, however, which they did and were quite successful at.
The Rhodesian spirit of inventiveness and being able to be
self sufficient and quite brave I think helped them in
their air force. Endeavors Ian Smith's story is quite fun.
He was shot down over Greece or Macedonia and remained
on the run from the Germans, hiding in peasant villages
for a while with I think a broken armor leg,
until he finally reached safety. The war then ended. The
Rhodesian contribution had been large for the sized country it was,
and so the British offered them independence, which is the
only way World War Two really matters to Rhodesia is
that the British said that they could become independent if
they wanted it, under whatever conditions they wanted, keeping their government.
They declined because they thought being part of the Commonwealth
would help them, and that really came back to bite
them about twenty years later, which we'll discuss in minute.
I guess the other way it impacted them was that
excuse me, after the war. It was only forty eight
that the South Africans built their apartheid system, which the
Rhodesians disliked, and that ended up creating a lot of
tension in the region and internationally, So that'd be the
other way it affected them. But Rhodesia was never invaded
during World War Two. They contributed men, was a ton
of men, so it was something of a small war
for them in which they got some more experience and
close relationships with the Empire, but was otherwise not overly impactful.
Speaker 1: What was the attitude of the world towards them after
World War Two? You know, World War Two is an
ideological shift, right Ethno states are looked down upon, And yeah,
I mean you were talking about, well, you know what
starts happening twenty years after, But that doesn't all just
happen at once. It has to build up.
Speaker 2: So yeah, there are a couple of things. One was
that after Churchill was thrown out in was it spring
or summer of forty five and replaced with attlee as
bad as looking back, Churchill probably was attlee was just impossible.
He kept he nationalized the coal and rail industries along
with other mining industries, kept ration and going for like
five years after the war, something crazy. So England was
just a horrible place to live at that time, and
that helped Rhodesia, and that people wanted to move from
England's to Rhodesia because there they could just buy a
farm and with a successful life without having to worry
about the socialist taxation and rationing and all that. Tim
Bax and his book Three SIPs of Gin describes his
family moving from Britain to British Southern Africa just because
it was so much pleasant. So there was that. The
other thing was that the British Empire was a bankrupt
after the war. I mean you remember in the beginning
of the war they were confiscating wedding rings to pay
for American arms. Then they lost when they retreated from Dunkirk.
So it was a mess and they didn't really have
the will or the resources to hold on to the
empire anymore. That mattered less to Rhodesia than it might
appear at first glance, just because they could hold on
to it themselves had it not been for later fighting.
It was really that the British started seeing empire negatively
rather than positively that urt Rhodesia rather than say in
Aiden or Yemen. When the British retreated, that was a
mess for the locals because they couldn't hold onto it themselves,
so they ended up having to bring in Sterling as
a mercenary. Or in the Congo when the Belgians left,
that was a disaster for the Belgian Congolese because they
didn't really have the ability to hold onto it, so
they're masacred by the Simbas and during the Katonga unpleasantness.
But Rhodesia was different in that despite having a small
white population, it was able to fight and had good
relations between white and blacks in the country, so they
were able to fight the Communists had it not been
for the West looking at them negatively. So long way
of saying that after the war, it didn't matter as
much that Britain was giving up its empire. If anything,
that would have been a net positive for them, perhaps
because it would have meant less ideological control. What mattered
was it as you hinted at things like Rhodesia were
starting to be seen negatively. Even Singapore faced a good
bit of resistance for its anti communist policies. As Leak one,
you talks about Rhodesia much much more so because it
was mainly white rule through its landed voting system.
Speaker 1: You mentioned the uh that blacks slid there too. So
if there were you about a quarter million whites, how
many blacks would that be?
Speaker 2: I think about three million, four million. Yeah, it's somewhat
hard to tell because they lived like villages and the
government was investing heavily in the villages. But you can
only do so much being counting when it's quite undeveloped
situation like that. But it was in the blow ten million,
but well above like one or two million range.
Speaker 1: I can't help but think that even before tensions started
to break, that there would have been some kind of
lead up, there would have been some kind of movement
towards talking about how we shouldn't be ruled by these
white colonialist suppressors.
Speaker 2: You see, it's interesting because it wasn't that happened to
some extent with Mugabe and Nkomo, who were the communist
leaders later on, But really that movement was quite small,
I mean far, far smaller than saying the Congo or
in South Africa, because the whites and blacks in Rhodesia
had quite good relations. Ian Smith talks about various experiences
with tribal chiefs and the servants who worked for him,
and they didn't really care that much about self rule
or mass democracy. The Western powers implied that they did
because of America's experience with civil rights during the time period,
but it wasn't really an issue. Most of the rebels,
for example, who fought in the war were from outside Rhodesia.
Some came from inside it, but generally they were from
Mozambique or Zambia or the Congo, moving down and fighting,
and then when they moved into Rhodesia were handed over
to the government by the black labors. So there was
certainly some of the well we need to get whitey
out of here because he's mean or whatever perspective, but
it was quite limited. In Rhodesia's case, it was mainly
the country was defined by good relations between European and Black.
Speaker 1: So what was their main way of the government's main
way of generating income, What were there you got to
have if you're only importing your you're in trouble. So
what were their exports?
Speaker 2: So this is something that came back to bite Mugabe
later when he confiscated the farmland and destroyed the economy.
Is Rhodesia was able to subsist because it built foreign
exchange reserves by exporting agricultural products. It was industrializing and
had an industrial economy. But really it's claim to fame
as being the bread basket of Africa. It was quite
successful it growing grain. It also was quite successful at
growing tobacco, so Rhodesian tobacco Rhodesian grain were well liked
in the region and widely exported. That became a problem
during the Bush War because of the embargo placed on
it by the UN. But up until then it was
successful and growing cash crops for exporting them or foreign
exchange and then buying whatever it needed. It is somewhat
like you know, Russia or wherever when they exported grain
the before World War One. So it was the agricultural
sector was really its cash generator on the international scale.
Speaker 1: Now it makes me wonder if there are any Rhodesian
cigars sitting around in some of these humid or some
billionaire's humid or somewhere.
Speaker 2: I hope. So that would be incredible to get to
smoke one of those. Yeah, I don't know. Zimbabwe can
even grow tobacco anymore in places a mass, but back
in the day they could, and it was supposedly their
wine and their tobacco was excellent when they could grow it.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I know a couple of people who claim to
have pre revolution Cubans in their in their private humidors.
That's awesome. So how does it? It seems like they're
doing well there. It basically starts off as a sounds
like a corporation basically, and then and then it goes
to private rule. It sounds like it goes to the
kind of voting system that we had here when the
country first started. You got to be a landowner, got
to be white, and then at some point things start
going downhill. So, yeah, is the is it just the
is it just the red menace? Just all the influence
from communism?
Speaker 2: It kind of So that was certainly a thing, But
the bigger aspect was earlier every time, about World War two,
and I think one of the main outcomes of that
war was the rise of egalitarianism as being the dominant ideology,
whether you're a communist or a classical liberal. Egalitarianism is
really the key aspect of that, not that we're all
equal in the eyes of God, which I think is true,
but equal in the eyes of being interchangeable economic units.
And the West believed that after the war. So Rhodesia, though,
there was no qualification for voting, but you had to
be white. It was mainly white voters because they were
the ones who they bood there and bought the largest states.
They had the property, and they were the ones voting
and running the government. The Duke of Montrose, for example,
as the Agricultural Commissioner, which when was the last time
a duke was in charge of anything in England? The
Hotel Cecil in the early nineteen hundreds, it was a
while ago. And so they hated that, they really hated
that Rhodesia was an egalitarian and that instead of just
letting everyone vote, they had this racial or it wasn't
a racial system, excuse me. They had this economic system
where you had to be a landowner pretty much to vote.
You could also like shares in a Rhodesian company or whatever,
but land was the big thing. So the West hated that.
I really really hated that just for the ideological egalitarian reason.
That was the big thing going on with Rhodesia, which
is whyfe a West hated it. Meanwhile, you had the
communist subversion in the region. The Portuguese, which bordered Rhodesia
to its east, and Mozambique had been fighting the communist
rebels there for a long time. Rhodesia was assisting in
that war, and then there ended up being a large
amount of rebels who fought in both conflicts, both against
the Portuguese and Mozambique and the Rhodesians in Rhodesia, and
so the Communists were getting interested in the region. The
Chinese ended up backing Mugabe and the Russians, where early
Soviets were backing the Como. They were different ethnic groups.
Mugabe was a Shonah and Nicomo was in Neble, and
so there's some ethnic conflict between the Blacks on that angle.
That largely it was communist influence supporting these people finding
outside rebels to then attack Rhodesia, and the West was
letting it happen because of egalitarianism that started up in
around sixty four or sixty five. Really sixty five is
probably the more accurate start date. Sixty five was also
when the Simba rebels in the Congo were having their
run ride across the country, which, for those who haven't
read my course Congo Mercenary, it's quite a fun book
about how like fifty guys can defeat an entire arm
and b of African communists. But the problem with the
Simbas was they just ran ride across the Congo immediately
and they killed raped all the nuns. It was quite horrific.
And the Belgians who had remained after dependence, and I
think sixty one it was either sixty or sixty one
when the Belgians left left because that was they weren't
putting up with that anymore. So during the Simba rebellion
in sixty five, Belgians flood south and made it to
Rhodesia and described what had happened in the Congo and
how the UN and Americans really let it happen where
it wouldn't have had to had Nikorb been brought in earlier,
or anyone confident been brought in earlier, but for ideological reasons,
the Congo was allowed to fall apart. So Rhodesia saw that,
and that was when deconization was really hitting the region
hard because rather than just giving things up, the West
was getting involved in making sure the what they called
majority rule and I think we'd call one man, one
vote one time, the pseudo democracy was going on. So
the Rhodesians decided, we're not going to do this. The
Portuguese are being damned by the West for triangled ont
Angola and those Ambique. They brought civilization to those countries
and now they're being damned for it. And meanwhile, the
Belgians left the Congo, which was once the jewel of
the Sub Saharan Africa. I mean, just as a side note,
most of the claims about King Loopold were entirely made
up and stuff going on just with the natives before
the Belgians got there. Despite the Belgians being there, it
wasn't Belgian policy. So the Congo was quite nice until
the Simbas and sixty five it took over, It temporarily
took over the government just kind of dissolved. But so
long way of saying, Rhodesia didn't want to deal with that,
they didn't want an apartheid system. Like South Africa had
because they saw it as immoral and unnecessary. But they
also didn't want to go the way of the Congo,
because who wants to be hacked to death by a
drugged up rebel. So they started petitioning Britain for independence,
which is a reminder they'd been offered in forty five
but decided against it. So with Harold Wilson in charge,
who was a socialist much like Attlee, he was even
worse than that. You raised the death tax rate to
ninety percent in Britain, which really broke the pack of
any hereditary power in the country. But so Wilson refused
to let them leave the Empire have independence without what
he called majority rule. So his slogan was nim maar
or no independence before majority rule. The Rhodesians refused because
they said, well, our land voting system is fair, it's democratic.
People can vote if only they prove they're capable, So
we're going to keep that because it's much better way
of handling things. Wilson didn't like that because of egalitarianism
and all that, so Wilson refused. In the Rhodesians in
November of nineteen sixty five, declared their unilateral declaration of independence.
It was modeled after the American Declaration of Independence, and
from that point on it was really the Rhodesians against
the world. The West, particularly Britain in the United States
hated them for it for various ideological reasons. In the Communists,
as mentioned before, I wanted to destroy the country for
reasons of regional power. So they with the exceptions of
Portugal and South Africa which were close allies, and Israel,
which supplied them with arms throughout the war, it was
them against the world.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think people would be surprised to find out
that Israel was a supporter of Rhodesia.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I've been trying to find out about that because
it's odd. I haven't found out why. All I know
is that they supplied them with arms and that Israel
had a connection with South Africa up until ben of
apartheid in ninety four because of mutual reasons of wanting
that with them in the Palestinians and the South Africans
and apartheid. But I haven't.
Speaker 1: I mean, the founders of South Africa are the founders
of Israel, the Rothschilds and the Oppenheimer family.
Speaker 2: I've been able to find out what was gone on Rhodesia.
Some of it was that I think Israel just was
mad at the UN at the time period, and a
lot of the sanction in embargoes were being carried out
by the or enforced by the UN. So there was
some of that. But yeah, it's odd and I don't.
Speaker 1: Know, Well, it could also be tension with the red
with the Reds, you know, so you know, they see
somebody getting attacked by the Reds and they're like, Okay, well, yeah,
we'll back them up or something like that. Right, so
how do we how do we start getting into where
now it may not be so safe to be a
white person in Rhodesia.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So, in sixty five or sixty six, the UN
passed its first ever sanctions package. It was targeted at Rhodesia.
It was different in terms of pretty much every sanctions
policy that's followed afterwards, and that it was mandatory, so
to be a member of the UN in good standing
you had to go along with the sanctions. Everyone went
along with it, with the exception of Portugal, South Africa
and Israel for their various reasons. Portugal, as a reminder,
was ruled by Salazar at the time. That only really
ended with the Carnation Revolution in seventy four, and Salazar
was hated by the West much like Ian Smith was.
So at that point they were surrounded.
Speaker 1: The West doesn't the West doesn't like it when you
when you win every election one hundred percent. No, if
you're going to ra if you're going to rig your elections,
you have to do it a lot better than that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you have to buy those dominion voting machines like
Brazil Dian But yeah, yeah, so they hated Salazar, they
hated South Africa. Rhodesia was surrounded at that point because
Rhodesia had it originally composed what's now Zimbabwe and what's
now Zambia. The Zambians broke off in the early sixties
and formed oone country. It's better now and was better
in seventy nine when Rhodesia fell, But it was originally
a communist style country. I don't know if it was
overly ideological or if it was more like the Congo
where it was just a mess. But anyway, so Rhodesia
had Zambia to its northwest and Mozambique to its east,
and North and South Africa to its south. Those were
the countries bordering it. Zambia and Mozambique were full of communists,
but because Mozambique was controlled by the Portuguese, it was
really only Zambia through which the rebels could come up
until seventy four. That was helpful to the Rhodesians because
it limited the border size. As I mentioned earlier, they
were only about two hundred fifty thousand whites, so pretty
small number of men you can draw from that group,
and the blacks volunteered for a couple of units, but
the Rhodesian army was still small. I think at most
points it was under twenty thousand people. So the Rhodesians
were fighting in the Bush War, which mainly that point
consisted of the farms would be attacked or the farming estates,
like I talked about earlier, wuld be attacked by the rebels,
who would torture the black labors and try and kill
the white families, with very limited success up until seventy four,
at which point the war went from being really what
was described as a police action somewhat like in Malaysia
in the fifties, to a full scale war because Portugal
fellow the Socialists and the Carnation Revolution, and they instantly
gave up their colonies in Mozambique and Angola. Mozambique suddenly
became this large scale beacon of communism through which not
only could the rebels could come into Rhodesia and attack
it in much larger units than they had previously been
able to, but also it was this huge country that
they were able to rest in, rearm in, be provided
with Communist training and aiden. So that really became a
problem for the Rhodesians. They Rhodesia was someone like America
and Vietnam, where they won a lot of battles, all
the battles, probably, but had trouble turning that into any
sort of strategic success. The Mozambique operations you read about
a great examples of that. I'm forgetting the names now,
but there were a few or they would go in
and at the cost of one or two wounded, they'd
kill thousands of rebels. But it also expanded the war
and got the so called international community even more angry
at them, so it ended up being a wash in
terms of a fact. The other problem was that Rhodesia,
if you look at it a map from Zimbabwe. Now
it has no sea access, it's surrounded by land. So
if they wanted supplies, particularly oil, the only way they'd
been able to import oil was through the port of
Bierra in Mozambique, because South Africa has no oil of note,
when they were sanctioned in the eighties and nineties, they
were really making it out of coal, which you can't
make oil out of coal and then supply another country
with it. You can barely do that for yourself. The
Germans found that out, I think in the end of
World War two. But anyway, sorry, that's off topic. But
so if they wanted oil, they had to get it
through Bierra. When mozambiqu failed, they no longer had the
era through which they could import oil, and that really
hurt their war machine and agricultural machine. So the war
escalated in seventy four. They had a lot fewer supplies
with which they could fight it. Also, if you want
to ask a question, please interrupt me. I'll just keep going.
But I'll keep going, okay, So the war escalated in
seventy four. What became a problem for the rudisions was
the oil situation. I mentioned a minute ago that they
had a much larger border now to defend, which was
a problem for them because without oil they really had
to use horses to patrol it. They lacked planes, they
lacked helicopters, they lacked reconnaissance vehicles. They had all of those,
but oil was limited and numbers were limited because they
couldn't import anything. So the Gray Scouts were patrolling the
border on horses with fALS, which makes for some cool
pictures but isn't overly useful. So the war became much
more of a problem for them. More rebels were coming
through and attacking farms, more rebels were getting in large
scale firefights with them. They had a limited ability to
respond with their power. When they did respond with their power,
and some set of bombing or strafing or whatever. It
was much more dropping in paratroopers to fight rebels, which
I mean they would dropped the same paratroopers like six
seven times a day sometimes, but still only so much
you can do, so the war became a larger problem.
The South Africans also started stabbing them in the back
around that time. South Africa, as I mentioned earlier, had
it's apartheid system. The world hated it for that for
all the reasons you can imagine. So South Africa was
trying to build some space for itself. It thought the
way to do that was by leaving the Rhodesians for
the wolves to eat, which didn't help South Africa at all.
The world still hated it, but it could say, oh, no,
we're not like those evil Rhodesians, where you're sanctioning them
and going along with it. So the South Africans pulled
out the armored police forces they had stationed in South
Africa to help it defend its borders and cities, stopped
really supplying it with weapons for a while, and started
undercutting it in diplomatic negotiations that Smith was engaging, and
largely in Britain. So Rhodesia had a much harder time
fighting the war after seventy four. Then Jimmy Carter was
elected in seventy six. One of his partners in crime
was Andy Young, who was a fellow civil rights activist
from Georgia. Young was one of the main backers of
the communists in Rhodesia. He particularly was close with Mugabe,
but also supported Nkomo. So America up to that point
had been really against Rhodesia, but it became even more
so after that point. A. Kissinger had been somewhat playing
both sides, and Smith describes Kissinger well. If you read
Kissinger's autobiography, he says he regrets demolishing Rhodesia, and he
was being very disingenuous when he was dealing with Smith.
But still America hadn't been overtly hostile in the way
it was under Carter up until Carter was elected, because
Nixon and Ford were somewhat ambivalent about it. That was
in seventy six. Things kept getting worse during the war.
A lot of white started fleeing the country as things
got worse. I think particularly that started heating up after
seventy five with just people I've been leaving and moving
to South Africa. So Rudy just started having a demographic
crisis where it didn't really have the men to fight
the war or the economy to support conflict. So Smith
started really looking for a way out from what I
gather in about seventy five or seventy six, couldn't really
find a good one, and things kept going back and forth.
Then in seventy nine, two big escalatory events happened one
was Nikomo. He was the one backed by the Soviets
or yeah, Soviets, excuse me, used two surface to air
missiles to shoot down civilian airliners traveling from Salisbury to
South Africa. I forget the names of the flights, but
if you just look up Rhodesian planes shot down you
can find it. It was particularly horrific because they were
obviously civilian airliners, and then when they crashed, instead of
helping the survivors as a civilized force would have done,
Niccomo's men tortured and vanetted them to death. So it
was horrific. And that that was in seventy nine, and
it really encouraged a lot of Rhubesians who had been
trying to stay to just leave because they could really
see what the rebels were and that the rebels looked
like they were going to win. So that worse for
the demographic crisis. Then the remaining oil the Rhodesians had
was stored and pretty much stored in one central facility,
and the rebels managed to blow it up. So at
that point the Rhodesians had to give in because the
South Africans weren't being helpful. Their oil was gone and
most of their people had left, so they gave in.
And at first there was a non Mugabe government. Mugabe
said it was able to win in an unfair election,
so they readid the election. Mugabe tortured people until they
voted for him and sent his thugs to scare them
into voting for him and ended up winning that. And
then that's all she wrote in the game Zimbabwe and
the hell a hole. Within a few years.
Speaker 1: Well, they were still a part of the Empire this
whole time, the Empire not giving them any help.
Speaker 2: New is so, as I mentioned, the British really hated
that Rhodesia wasn't an egalitarian society, so when it unilaterally
declared independence, the British claimed that independence was invalid, but
then stopped providing any sort of help or aid or
you know, anything like that th Rhodesians. They only restarted
the aid or whatever they call it in seventy nine
when majority rule happened, but in the interim the fourteen
years not so much. The Empire abandoned them, and it
was really quite the betrayal because not only were they
not helping, but the United Kingdom's navy, other than the
Falklands conflict. Its last real gasp was attempting to patrol
the port of Bierra to stop the Rhodesians from importing
oil up until it fell. As I mentioned in seventy four.
For one, they failed at that, which is quite funny
to them, for the or the navy that used to
rule the waves now can even stop Greeka oil transports
from sliding into a port in southern Africa. But also
it just showed the British were implied actively opposed Rudisha's
continued existence after sixty five.
Speaker 1: You've used the term egalitarian a few times. I mean
that it can be used in a lot of different ways.
How are you using it?
Speaker 2: I think it's the concept that in terms of policy
and politics, it's viewing humans as interchangeable units that all
be traded, is treated as having the same exact capabilities
and possibilities for the future.
Speaker 1: So like every it's like we have here, you know,
I just call it an open open air strip mall
where everything is about commerce and all we are are
basically annuities going through commerce, and that's that's our purpose,
our purpose to these people to this regime and definitely
post the post world War two, the post Nuremberg regime
is that we are economic unit's, nothing more and nothing less.
And if we are, if we have any kind of
allegiance to anything historic, or anything religious, or anything about
our family, our heritage, that it would interfere with that
commercial spirit, then we're the enemy.
Speaker 2: Basically, Yes, I think that's definitely the majority of it.
Adding to that, I think there are two things. One
is just the idea that not only are we economic units,
but we're entirely interchangeable ones. It's like the idea that
the guy who like murdered someone at a seven to
eleven would have been an astronaut if you have like
a better calculus teacher, which it's absurd and we all
know it's absurd, but it's government policy in Britain and
America and has been for a long time. Adding to that,
I think is the idea that the government ought enforce
equality or equity really and so instead of having the
Duke of Montrose beer agricultural commissioner, he has to be
cut down the size. So we're going to taxes a
state until it's sold through various death duties and income
taxes and capital gains taxes and that sort of thing,
or he'll now be the same economic unit really and
have the same potential in life as you know, the
peasant who's been a peasant for a thousand generations, or
not just a peasant, but the recently important Senegalese peasant.
I think it's that idea as well.
Speaker 1: I think another thing that might be there is the
idea that you care about others more than you care
about your own. You know, you're not supposed to have
your own. There's I was talking to Josiah Lippincott yesterday
and he had in his background I think as a
brain scan of like someone who you consider a quote
unquote right wing conservative, and have you seen that one?
This liberal and it's complete opposite a too. You care
more about your own and your own family, and then they're,
you know, like the ship lib would be cares way
more about people that aren't close to them, that they've
never meet and they will never meet, and they hope
they will never meet, even though they love them so much.
Speaker 2: I'm not a huge Dickens fan, but he did have
a great term for that sort of thing. Now I'm
forgetting it's like telescopic philanthropy or something where you're going
to ignore the starving like day laborers that live half
a mile away from you. But then you have to
send all your kids toys and disposable income to Guinea
or wherever wor it'll do no good, but you feel
much better about it because it's far away. And added
to that, just on the Rhodesian note is a life
was quite good for the Blacks and Rhodesia, and they
quite liked the Rhodesian government because of it. There's this
story from the Great Betrayal where a longtime servant of
Ian Smith's family had some tooth absess that he wasn't
getting taken care of. So Ian Smith like made him
go to the doctor, made him go to the dentist.
They tried to deal with it. The guy was difficult,
so it didn't really work out, but you know, they
really tried. And similarly, the villages in which pretty much
all the Africans lived, the government's spent a great deal
of resources investing in them, trying to make them better
to us. I think that can sometimes come across as cringe,
because we've seen how the Great Society worked out in America.
But there they had the point that these people had
been living in the Stone Age and were so showing
a great deal of like capability to work well on
farms and such and so investing in the area and
you know, trying to like make clean water wells or
whatever it had some point to It was going well,
and it really did go well. The living standard for
blacksm Rhodesia was far better than it was in Portuguese
Mo's Mbique or God forbid the Congo, particularly after a
communist rule in the Congo. So it was an egalitarian
It was a very paternalistic government. It was much more
like England before the first Reform Bill and I think
thirty two or America before Jackson in the thirties, and
that you know, only the best could vote. But then
what they did with their votes wasn't what the current
crowd does, which is, you know, globalization to become obscenely
wealthy and some you know, fake idea or company, but
rather improve the country and improve the lives of those
living there, in both black and white. And it worked
quite well, but that was entirely ignored by the international
community because it was paternalistic rather than just nonsensical government
welfare policies.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think a lot of people have a difficulty
separating egalitarianism from good policy that keeps order.
Speaker 2: Yes, I think.
Speaker 1: I think also a lot of people have to me
the difference between right wing and left wing, true right
wing and left wing is whether one's egalitarian or one
is not. And then you will have people who will
argue that, like, there are historic groups we probably know
who I'm referring to who call themselves socialists, but because
because they call themselves socialists, that means that they're left wingers.
And then I asked, well were they egalitarian? People are like, well, well,
there were egalitarian towards their own that's that's not called that.
You're not you're using that term. I'm wrong, you're using
that term. You're vending that term to make your point.
Speaker 2: Yeah. There's a famous quote from Lord Birkenhead about the
Cecil family, which was heavily involved in British politics from
Elizabeth the first up until the mid twentieth century, that
as in humans as in race horses, there's a great
deal of there's a great case to be made for
the hereditary principle. I always think it's funny, but it
also really is true. If you look at Rhodesia as
opposed to be Yeah, they just like operated based on
that and the result was higher living standards in the
successful country. And you know, the same could be said
of Singapore. Probably a leak one U was an egalitarian.
He just made it a successful country by operating based
on rational principle. Similarly with Bukela today. Or this gangster
probably isn't going to be a good guy because he's
been a gangster for his whole life. So we'll just
throw him in jail and throw away the key. It
makes a great deal more sense than saying, well, I
know this person is murdered like seven other people, but
if we only let him out the eighth time, then
that'll really be when he shines and takes us to Mars.
It's it's absurd, but most of our policy today is
based on the idea that, for whatever reason, it's true, Well.
Speaker 1: There's a certain group of a group of us who
you know, romanticize Rhodesia. I guess that's that's where what
we should talk about next, is that the legacy of
Rhodesia that we we look at it and you know,
I wonder how if I know it's pronounced different ways.
But you know if one hundred years from now, if Irania,
if they're still around, if they will be looked upon
as the in the same way. But there's uh, yeah,
there's a way of you know, people who are educated
in the subject look back and they're like, well, this
is order they were. Everything was orderly, people got along
even though it was a multicultural society. And yeah, and
it wasn't an until of course it's always outside influence
influencing people on the inside. And yeah, so what is
what why do we talk about Rhodesia.
Speaker 2: So there are a few things. One, and it has
to be said, is that their aesthetics were incredible either,
like there's only so many places now where there are
like skinny people wearing shorts that don't just horrify you
to look at. In addition to that, they're carrying fails,
which is probably the coolest looking gun of the Cold War.
So they really nailed it on that angle. And Rhodesian
brush stroke is an awesome cameo. So they have all
those points in those in their favor where you know,
it's a lot. It's a great deal more fun to
post a picture of a sell a scout or Rhodesian
light infantryman than say, like a Portuguese private in those
z Mbique they I.
Speaker 1: Don't think people, I don't think people really get how
important aesthetics is. Yeah, yeah, I mean it really is
to to the right, because you know, if you look
at you know, if you compare the you know, the
Austrian painter's crew and Stalin's crew, or the way Lenin
dressed on a regular basis, it's like, really, which one
would you how would you rather dress?
Speaker 2: I mean, well, even using the Soviets, particularly later, like
the posters are pretty cool. I pore the Soviet Empire
and all that, but they did nail the pictures were
Now I think people feel less ridiculous posting a picture
of a pretend Soviet coal miner than a picture of
the real thing, because they got the aesthetics right in
the picture. Not that you're wrong about how they looked
at your life, but you know, they like to use
the term very very loosely. The non free countries I
think of the twentieth century understood that and tried to
look cool because you know, it made people think they
were cool. In Rhodesia was really the only country in
the Anglo sphere to not slouch towards unrespectability. You know,
like if you go outside the day, everyone you see
dress would probably be arrested for indecency. Even one hundred
years ago, they were men more tales rather than t shirts.
And it's just Rhodesia didn't do that. They'd dressed better
and looked a lot cooler. And I think that really
is why like a lot of particularly people who don't
care about it ideologically love Rhodesia, is because they looked
quite cool. Beyond that, the other thing is that it's
really the counter example of what the West could have
been like. Had Jackson not been elected, had the first
Performed Bill not been passed, because of the unpleasantness on
the continent, England and America would have been very different places.
All the problems we have with now would be replaced
by different problems, but I think much more solvable ones.
There are certain things that can be done in a
country that's wealthy and ruled by the best rather than
obscenely wealthy and ruled by the worst. Because you don't
get welfare policies in a place like Rhodesia, you might
get assistance to help build places up, but you're not
going to have like social security or food stamps or medicare,
and Rhodesia because they have no reason to do it.
It's a successful country and everyone's expected to be a
successful adult human being, rather than you know, a modern
mass democracy, where I think because of the egalitarianism we
talked about earlier, the ideas that if someone fails as
society's fault rather than that person's innate flaws. I don't
really read Tom Clancy, but in one of his books
he described America as the land of pills for every
problem and disorders for every character flaw. And I think
that really is true. And Rhodesia as the counter example,
we're instead of saying, well, you know, we really need
to hear from the convicted convict what he thinks of
tariff policy regarding German automobiles or Italian suits or whatever,
we should just have like a department that handles that,
and the people have shown themselves to be committed citizens
that are successful handle it. And that's what Rhodesia did
their land policy. I know I've mentioned him a few times,
but the Duke of Mantros developed Rhodesian land policy, particularly
as regarding like what land would be set aside somewhat
like Indian reservations for the blacks to buy as they
wanted to, so they could become landed voters and have
farms of their own. And it was quite successful in
getting the blacks on their side. It was about a
fifty to fifty split of the arable land below where
the saese fly makes it more less uninhabitable, and it
was a prudent policy that now Americans would either on
one side be uncomfortable because the government is selling land,
or uncomfortable on the other because it wasn't just given
away free to the villages to be wasted. But it
was a successful prudent policy that I think split the
middle and made it where the blacks felt more like
citizens that could participate in Rudesian society and the white
still of land where they could buy the great estates
and farm them for export. So it worked well, and
that's the sort of policy you get from a place
like Rhodesia. And I think when we look back at it,
people see it and like it because they can tell
just from looking at it in the aesthetics. But then
also if you hear a speech of Ian Smith's or
if you read about any policy they engaged in, it's
a smart one and it's one that you would never
get out of DC today with either side in charge,
just because it's like one that makes sense and isn't
either ideologically captured or just meant to be poork for
a base that doesn't really know what's going on.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think, yeah, I've said this that I think
a lot of like boomers, And yeah, I would say
a lot of conservatives in general tend to be like
pro Israel more so. Yeah, maybe equal you know, the
whole eschatological religious side of it, but which is a
complete falsehood. But also because they see a country where
the borders are closed and they they present as caring
about their own people, they present as wanting to protect
their own people. And I mean you can just look
around this country for decades and try to find that person,
you know, and even when you look back, you realize,
you know, that wasn't Ronald Reagan. No, Ronald Reagan. You know,
amnesty bills and machine you know, machine guns and all
these things that that he did that you know, really
started the downfall. And yeah, I think that that's another
thing that a lot of this regime, this post war
regime hates is anyone who stands up in front of
their country, especially if their country is predominantly European, White,
or Christian, and speaks directly to the people and loves
his loves their own, loves his people. You know, you
can say that Vladimir Putin doesn't love his own people,
that he's lying, but at least it outwardly looks like
he loves his own people. And I think that goes
to his approval ratings and it goes to how you know,
but that just seems to when you look at a
place like Rhodesia, where they loved everyone, They loved the
whites there, love loved the blacks, and saw a like
a no blessed oubliege towards these people who are you know,
who have lower IQs than them, And it's like you
look at that and you're like, they could that could
have lasted, but it couldn't last in the post Nuremberg world.
It just wasn't allowed. That's not allowed. You're not allowed
to love your own people. You're not allowed to have
pride because it's a danger to you know, the line,
the whole line go up crew the whole, you know,
where they were all economic we're all economic units crew.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like the post World War two like focus on
the economy, Uberles is particularly weird. But really I think
it's not just that, Like he even had World War
one and two not happened, I think we'd be dealing
with a lot of the similar problems that we are,
just because it's really at its route, the same thing
that led to the reform Bill and Jackson, where we're
supposed to believe that everyone just can be interchangeable, even
if the focus is on you know, national glory or
whatever instead of just purely the economy. Like if you
read Barbara Tuckman's The Proud Tower, it's a very normal book.
It's not based in any way. But there were a
lot of problems before the Great War that I think
were caused by democracy. So Rhodesia is useful as a
counter example, not just to the post World War two
regime though that's that's started startingly clear looking at it,
but also the post of eighteen thirty six or thirty
two excuse me, world, just because they dodged a lot
of those problems by not going along with it. They
said no you're gonna have to show some commitment to
the country by owning land or property or business here,
and only then can you vote when we see that
you're responsible or able to manage money and not just
lose everything. Britain, for example, didn't have the importation problem
of various Third world ers until it was wind rushed
in forty eight or something. It was under Atlee, and
it's been a disaster since then, as anyone can tell
you from the country. But it was also a shithole
before then. Atlete had already made the country a hell,
and it had been horrible in the inter war period too,
largely because they just taxed the successful and made the
country a hell. I know, like attacking socialism is cringe
now on the right, but really like it did make
Britain just awful, and that place was formally the leader
of the world in terms of industry and trade and
you know, making life bearable and good for all those
living in it, whether laborers or not. And they got
rid of all that because of democratic impulses and made
it just the nanny state that it is now. And
that's far worse because they have like twelve million Pakistanis
or whatever but it'd be bad even with help them.
Speaker 1: Well somebody, I can't remember what this quote was, but
it was very very simple. It was Britain traded empire
and glory for the NHS.
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, that's a great quote. Yeah, that's insane. It
makes no sense. Most of them don't even use the NHS.
And this is one thing like when you travel to Europe.
When we were talking to someone who had like a
broken leg and she wasn't able to go there for
two more months because there was no waitlist. A yeah.
Not to rattle on about the NHS, not really the
point of this podcast, but it is really startling to
look at Britain really before probably Winston Churchill and Wood
George's Parliament Bill in nineteen eleven for the People's Budget
of nineteen oh nine that sparked it in the Britain
that followed. It's entirely different countries and one is the
one we think of when we think of Britain and
the other is some like socialist hell that you'd rather
live in Poland then.
Speaker 1: Yeah, all right, well I appreciate it, thanks for the talk.
Do you what do you have to promote?
Speaker 2: Oh? Yeah, so follow me on Twitter I'm at will
Underscore ten Underscore one that's where I post all my
work and my ramblings on the other is on substack,
the American Tribune dot News. That's a I do other
things as well, but those probably the two. They're of
interest to people listening to this on the substack. Like
I talked about earlier, I mainly focused on Europe before
the Great War and on decolonization and its horrors, particularly
South Africa and Rhodesia, just because I think those are
ones with which we in America can relate, particularly if
you live in a southern city like Atlanta something. You know,
what's going on in you Hannesburg.
Speaker 1: I am not. I am. I no longer have to
suffer that, thank god. Now I just now I just
have to worry about bus loads of Haitian showing up.
Speaker 2: Which they might, but uh, you know, get it, get
your undercar flamethrower. Like you're living in South Africa, we
might as well embrace the mad Max.
Speaker 1: I don't think I could pull off the shorts.
Speaker 2: Well.
Speaker 1: I appreciate it.
Speaker 2: Thank you, yeah, thanks for having me on s