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President for Life sneers at ‘white face’

Zimbabwean President for Life, Robert Mugabe told a crowd of media and spectators on Thursday while visiting Hector Pietersen Memorial in Soweto, “I don’t want to see a white face”.

Mugabe delivered his latest sneer in his usual affected British colonial accent, flashing some cuff-links and tailor-made arrogance, once again highlighting how utterly risible the post-colonial Afro-Saxon circus has become.

An SABC reporter recorded the incident as Mugabe exited the museum, and walked past a female black television journalist who asked whether the tour had evoked any emotion.

The Memorial, incidentally, is a race-baiting cheap thrill of the post-1994 kind, where lies about ‘white oppression and brutality’ are exhibited as fact. The poor Hector was shot by black thugs, but the real story would not have had the same impact.

When Mugabe saw a white journalist behind her, he pushed the microphone away and wearily said: “I don’t want to see a white face,” as impervious as ever to his farcical contradictory attitude.

Mugabe’s comment can be heard in this video which has been posted on the SABC’s YouTube channel:

The deplorable state of Zimbabwe accurately reflects the more than three decades of the old Marxist tyrant’s misrule, despite his class-conscious accent.

The embarrassingly liberal nonagenarian puppet who “freed blacks from the colonial shackles of an oppressive and racist white regime” has not only failed to improve the lot of the majority of blacks but has actually worsened their plight considerably, presiding over what might be the most rapid disintegration yet of a modern nation state and the genocide of 22 000 Ndebele.

Not only has Mugabe’s regime failed to maintain the white infrastructure that was put in place by the Smith regime, but millions of literally starving Zimbabweans have fled to South Africa’s white cosmopolitan centres. They voted in their anti-white champion, only to abscond to the “racists” down south who would offer all the low-paid jobs as cleaners, gardeners and waiters in cafés and restaurants. Although, to be fair, many of the economic refugees to South Africa belonged to the minority Ndebele tribe, targeted by Mugabe.

It has become de rigueur for journalists, politicians and academics to offer what has become a near-universal analysis: Mugabe was a promising leader who became corrupted over time by power.

This meme was popularized after Mugabe began seizing white-owned farms in 2000. But this conception of Mugabe, propagated by the liberals who championed him in the 1970s and 1980s, is obviously a cover-up for their initial admiration.

From the beginning of his political career Mugabe outshone more moderate Marxists, openly stating his racist and authoritarian intentions to cheering liberals.

A similar scene is being played out at the University of Cape Town, where the ultra-left white principal Max Price is advancing a black racist and authoritarian discourse, succumbing to radical pressures to remove statues of whites, soon to be followed by the removal of white academics.

Mugabe certainly did not morph into a caricature of the Marxist stooge. By 1978 already he had displayed a particular ruthlessness that ought to have indicated what was to follow.

After four black moderates announced that they had reached an “internal settlement” with the Smith government, paving the way for democratic elections, one of these leaders, Ndabaningi Sithole, dispatched 39 envoys to meet representatives of Mugabe. The envoys were captured, murdered and, according to Time magazine, “their bodies were then laid out by the guerrillas in a grisly line at the side of the road as a warning to local tribespeople.”

The following year, in protest of an open election Mugabe’s organization released a death list naming 50 “Zimbabwean black bourgeoisie, traitors, fellow-travelers and puppets of the Ian Smith regime, opportunistic running-dogs and other capitalist vultures.” Mugabe’s henchmen then killed scores of black civilians who attempted to vote.

According to the despot “the multiparty system . . . is a luxury” and that if Zimbabweans did not like Marxism, “then we will have to re-educate them.”

Yet, in 1986, the University of Massachusetts Amherst bestowed an honorary doctorate on him just as he was completing his genocide against the Ndebele. In 1984, the University of Edinburgh awarded Mugabe an honorary doctorate and in 1994, Mugabe was inexplicably given an honorary knighthood by Queen Elizabeth II.

Today Zimbabwe suffers the highest inflation and lowest life-expectancy rates in the world.

South Africa’s black colonialists

by Dan Roodt

Recently I watched a so-called “debate” on SABC2 on what was referred to as “land reform”. Most of the participants were calling for a Zimbabwe-style expropriation of Afrikaner-owned land.

For some time now I have been thinking that South Africa is perhaps the first country in the world afflicted with black colonialism. As ever, one’s perception of our socio-political situation is entirely determined by the paradigm or worldview from which one gazes upon South Africa.

Notwithstanding the anti-Western rhetoric of the black colonialists, they share the same culture, language and imperialist disdain for us as Lords Milner or Kitchener of yore, burning everything in sight and herding us into concentration camps. Black and white colonialists on the SABC2 were united in their thirst for land and for forcibly removing the rightful owners – like any conquistador in the days of the Spanish Empire.

Of course, black colonialism often clothes itself in leftist idiom. Hence, the white British Marxist Professor Ruth Hall of UWC was herself calling for the eviction of Afrikaner natives from their land in favour of some new form of plantation slavery, preferably lorded over by people with Ph.D.’s in dubious disciplines from the United Kingdom.

Seated in air-conditioned offices, the black colonialists wish to evict Afrikaner peasants from their ancestral lands. The colonialists commute in spanking new German luxury cars while the sunburnt Afrikaners in shorts and velskoens drive around on dusty roads in aged utilitarian bakkies. The arrogance of this colonialist land-grab project rivals and surpasses the infamous Berlin Conference of 1884-85.

Our minds, like our universities, have been colonised. Hence the almost complete lack of critical perspective on the colonialist enterprise known as the “New South Africa”. The black colonialists are bourgeois through and through, vacillating between a kind of British comprador consciousness and dreaming of being African American, especially now that an African American is ruling the USA, that great imperial power.

The contempt for our indigenous Afrikaans culture, literature, cuisine, style and our very names have never been greater. Britain never changed the Voortrekker name of Pretoria, yet the black colonialists – who are also sadists – relish in humiliating us daily with their colonial folly of “Tshwane” which is about as foreign to South Africa as the Cyrillic alphabet.

South Africa is being pillaged by these colonialists who enslave and exploit us, confiscating our resources to finance their colonial lifestyle in ludicrous Italianate mansions.

Colonialism and imperialism are destroying us, both materially and spiritually. Our country is in dire need of national liberation. The first step is to liberate our minds of the rubbish that passes for the dominant ideology, justifying the land grabs and exploitation.

This piece also appeared as a letter in Business Day.

John Maynard Keynes: Where’s The Genius?! (Part 2)

by Ilana Mercer

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The following is the conclusion of my conversation with Benn Steil. (Read part 1.) Dr. Steil is senior fellow and director of international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations. His latest book is “The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order.”

ILANA MERCER: After reading a negative review of your book in The Times Literary Supplement,I decided to go cold turkey on what had been a guilty pleasure for over a decade. I did not renew my TLS subscription. The TLS had stupidly assigned the review to one Eric Rauchway, a left-coast history teacher. Rauchway would not let an argument favorable to the gold standard—yours—stand. Your case against the Bretton Woods system of “managed currencies” he turned on its head. Rauchway credited Harry Dexter White, one of Bretton Woods’ architects, with helping to lift the “cross of gold” from the shoulders of the world’s working classes. Since White was also a Soviet spy, Rauchway quickly concluded that the Soviets saved capitalism (an “unknown ideal” for a very long time). Sound money is suspect, but a Soviet spy is capitalism’s savior. How do you unpack that!?

BENN STEIL: You can’t get blood from a stone, and you can’t get logic from Rauchway’s review, just gobs of nonsense and libel (as I documented onon my blog). The review’s title, “How the Soviets saved capitalism,” is so inane that the only explanation for it is that Rauchway, or his TLS editors, fell in love with the sheer childish cheekiness of it. It certainly bears no relation to Rauchway’s account of Bretton Woods, nor that of anyone who can actually claim to know anything about it. Rauchway would no doubt mock the economist who wrote the following of the 19th century classical gold standard: “[t]he various currencies, which were all maintained on a stable basis in relation to gold and to one another, facilitated the easy flow of capital and of trade to an extent the full value of which we only realize now, when we are deprived of its advantages.”Unless, that is, Rauchway knew who it was – none other than J. M. Keynes.

MERCER: We can both agree that John Maynard Keynes’ opposition to WWI and his “bitterness over the terms of the peace” were admirable. Priceless too was Keynes’ description of President Woodrow Wilson as “slowminded and bewildered”; a “blind and deaf Don Quixote.” (pages 70-71) On the other hand, also quite admirable was the following unflattering description of Keynes’ “General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.” It comes courtesy of our author: “It is only slightly outlandish to liken the book to the Bible: powerful in its message, full of memorable, mellifluous passages; at times obscure, tedious, tendentious, and contradictory; a work of passion driven by intuition, with tenuous logic and observation offered as placeholders until disciples could be summoned to supply the proofs.” (page 88) Have Keynes’ disciples really delivered? It would appear that the Keynesian faithful have foisted on free-market capitalists an unfalsifiable theory. Evidence that contradicts it, Keynesian kooks enlist as evidence for the correctness of their theory.

STEIL: Yes, if the economy sinks, then Paul Krugman was right about the need for massive stimulus; if it recovers in the face of plunging deficits, from spending cuts and tax increases, then Krugman was right that deficits were not a problem. Heads he wins, tails you lose.

MERCER: Keynes assessed Karl Marx’s “economic value” as “nil… apart from occasional flashes of insight.” (page 87) I would venture that in the United States, Marxism has been far less destructive to free-market capitalism than Keynesianism. Marxists honestly wish for capitalism’s demise and say as much. We can fight such an enemy. Conversely, Keynesians have redefined capitalism and banished our definition therefrom. The Keynesians then proceeded to cripple capitalism so as to ostensibly save it. Positively Orwellian.

STEIL: Keynes said that “if economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people on a level with dentists, that would be splendid.” Yet Keynes’s “General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money” had the effect of elevating economists to the status of technocratic wizards, even saviors. At Bretton Woods, Keynes also quite literally created the persona of the celebrity economist. Today, we are used to economists like Paul Krugman and Nouriel Roubini jetting around the world with eager journalists waiting on their every pronouncement. They owe it all to Keynes.

MERCER: A busybody. A planner. A Keynesian before his time. That is the impression I got of Harry Dexter White from your penetrating study. Not even from the unpublished handwritten essay you unearthed did I get the impression that White, who spied for the USSR, was a communist ideologue. Something occurred to me as I listened to the founder of PayPal—a patriotic, productive American who professes libertarianism—tout the merits of income distribution and progressive taxation to broadcaster Charlie Rose. Mr. PayPal sounded far more socialist than White, who, to go by your nuanced portrayal, was a “tinkerer, an engineer.” (page 20) Indeed, in his statement before the House Un-American Activities Committee, White better expressed the American Creed than most Republicans could today. All this was most revealing. It told me that even those who profess a love of freedom nowadays are less familiar intellectually with the American Creed than were freedom’s enemies during Bretton Woods.

STEIL: In terms of the economics White advocated for, he was boringly Keynesian. Yet, as that essay you mention illustrates, he believed passionately that the bold Soviet experiment with socialist economics was a success, and that the world would be moving in the direction of greater state control of industry and trade after WWII. He was also – which was not unusual in FDR’s Treasury – dangerously naïve about Soviet geopolitical ambitions and intentions towards the United States.

MERCER: How the mighty have fallen. The US, post WWII, was a creditor country that ran trade surpluses and rejected the demands of the Keynes camp that surplus countries be forced to reduce their surplus positions. (page 338) Libertarians generally dismiss the gap between U.S. exports and imports as an insignificant economic indicator. To me that sounds … Keynesian. Yes, I run a trade deficit with Costco, my hair stylist, or my GTI dealer. But I pay for my purchases. The data demonstrate that, in general, Americans circa 2013 don’t. What’s your verdict about America’s aggregate, negative balance of trade?

STEIL: I explain in the book’s epilogue why persistent American current account deficits were an inevitable feature of a U.S.-dollar based international monetary system, and why those deficits had, ultimately, to spell the demise for Harry White’s system – as it did in 1971, when President Nixon closed the gold window. Ending the dollar’s convertibility into gold should have, according to White’s thinking, which I explain at length in the book, ended the dollar’s global monetary role and precipitated economic chaos. Yet the globe limps on, on its fiat-dollar crutch, periodic financial crises notwithstanding.

MERCER: The US, a world superpower, is not the only country that has fallen from grace since Bretton Woods. South Africa, the superpower of Africa, is mentioned in “The Battle” as “the preeminent gold-mining nation.” (page 165) Prime Minister Jan Smuts was something of a power player on the international stage. Other than in Africa and in Hollywood, the South Africa of Mandela, Mbeki and Zuma—exposed in “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa”—doesn’t count economically ever since the Anglo-American axis “delivered” that country from the likes of Smuts. Your book is replete with accounts of US hypocrisy. Any thoughts about my former homeland, South Africa?

STEIL: You’re taking me out of my depths, as I’ve only been to South Africa once in my life. But I would say this: one reason why I believe New York City has become so much more livable, even civil, since the Giuliani-Bloomberg era began is that tribal politics has died down immeasurably. I pray that the next mayor will be wise enough not to take us back to the bad old days of playing one group off against another for political gain. New Yorkers should be New Yorkers. Period.

MERCER: The American press’s commentary throughout the battle of Bretton Woods is quite a shock to the system for what it reveals about the same press’s prevailing intellectual bankruptcy, in 2013. Back then, the New York Times was scathing about “the British financial expert’s” advocacy of “deficit financing and cheap money.” Other major media had mocked the worthless “product of the printing press.” The same sources lambasted “currency devaluation and credit expansion,” and warned against helping a debtor nation (Britain) at the expense of US solvency? (page 166) Have at it.

STEIL: The famed Henry Hazlitt, a 19th-century style classical liberal, was from 1934 to 1946 the New York Times’ principal editorial writer on economics; he wrote a weekly column along with many of the unsigned economics editorials. This almost certainly explains the Times’ hostile position on Bretton Woods. It also seems fair to say that a Hazlitt could never reprise such a role at the Times today.
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Mugabe understands democracy well

by Dan Roodt

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Is it not astounding that so many people are criticising the outcome of the Zimbabwean elections, when that country went through an official poll in which Zanu (PF) won a clear majority?

In addition, Robert Mugabe’s view of democracy is entirely commensurate with that of most western leaders, especially those of Britain and the US. There exists a dichotomy between the spectacle of campaigning and voting – the soap opera of elections – and the real business of power that is normally settled outside of public scrutiny, in proverbial smoke-filled rooms.

Democracy is what follows a “state of exception” (Carl Schmitt) during which one regime is replaced by another. Both the American and French revolutions were examples of such states of exception. In the case of Zimbabwe, Britain virtually appointed Mugabe as permanent president during the state of exception known as the Lancaster House Conference of 1979. Every election since in Zimbabwe has merely confirmed Britain’s support for revolutionary change in the ex-Rhodesia, hence the hypocrisy of complaints about largely minor deficiencies in the Zimbabwean electoral process.

Writing in the UK Daily Mail two days ago, columnist Stephen Glover said:

“Instead of expressing his anxieties, the Foreign Secretary could offer the Zimbabwean people a heartfelt apology on behalf of the British Government for inflicting Robert Mugabe on them in the first place, and then standing aside as he pillaged his country, murdered his enemies and ruined the economy… What has happened in Zimbabwe is to Britain’s eternal shame.”

Mr Mugabe is a self-styled “strong leader”. In so doing, he is simply displaying the “leadership” that everyone talks about, and that they even teach in business schools.

Modern democracy is indeed a process whereby the voter surrenders his freedom of action to members of the elite who may act on his behalf, tax him and even impoverish him to their heart’s content. During the banking crisis, we have seen how Western governments did the same and have burdened future generations with mountains of debt, simply to save their sponsors and cronies among members of the corrupt banking fraternity.

In most third-world countries, including Zimbabwe, you first queue to vote and then you stand in line for bread or some or other hand-out. The one is good practice for the other.

In South Africa, of course, those who queue to vote are rewarded with poverty, joblessness and grants of R250 a month, enough to buy beer and air time. Just look at the 10 biggest companies by market capitalisation on the JSE, and you will notice that smoking and drinking beer dwarf all other forms of economic activity, followed by mobile telephony.

Democracy is all about talking, drinking, smoking and making babies, for which you get child-support grants. The notion of freedom as defined by the philosophers of the western enlightenment is, of course, slightly more complex and subtle than subsisting for the sake of a pay-as-you-go cellphone connection.

Sadly, such classical ideas of freedom and what some people refer to as “higher ideals” have been derided by so-called “liberals” and Marxists as being tantamount to fascism. Taking pride in one’s language or culture, showing patriotism or constructing a society where people are not sheep to be lorded over by professional politicians, are all very suspect notions that are regularly denounced as “right-wing extremism”.

Aspiring to be one’s own master, holding one’s leaders accountable for public expenditure and the quality of their decision-making is reminiscent of the Tea Party programme in the US.

As the New York Times has assured us, the Tea Party is a racist movement of soon-to-be-outnumbered white Americans who hanker after the halcyon days of the Ku Klux Klan.

Private property, too, is a decidedly reactionary concept, which Mr Mugabe has “democratically” dispensed with. Most white-owned farms in Zimbabwe were bought after 1990 and after ZANU (PF)’s accession to power, yet the rights of these property owners were forfeited in favour of a revolutionary “land-reform programme”.

Most university professors in the West and in SA probably applauded him for trampling upon private property. Not to mention the nongovernmental organisations for whom starvation is big business and whose customers, the voters, will queue up again for hand-outs.

The destiny of man is to be a shopper. Everything else is Nazism, even though German Chancellor Angela Merkel still attends the annual Wagner Festival in Bayreuth.

No doubt the professors and media pundits will soon have Wagner banned worldwide and then everybody will just listen to Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga. Democracy entails the lowering of intellectual and aesthetic standards down to the basest level.

The verbiage of Barack Obama on “democracy” resembles the kitsch of fast food, wearing track suits and sports caps in public and the obsessive, banal voyeurism of most TV programmes. We are living through a modern version of Nero’s mob rule whereby a few powerful political and financial dictators occupy the minds of the masses with “bread and circuses”, an election being the ultimate circus, of course.

As Pat Buchanan has said somewhere, democracy cannot be foisted on people by carpet-bombing them from 40 000 feet. Zimbabwe is but one among a number of societies that have been destabilised by so-called democracy. In North Africa and the Middle East, the West has not balked at supporting Al-Qaeda and related fundamentalist movements in a kind of anti-modern fervour. The paradox is that modern democracy so often leads to fundamentalism, mayhem and even primitivism.

Systems of ethnic domination whereby one group is victimised by another are routinely approved as “democratic”. In fact, there is an element of sadism in South African democracy with its endemic violence, torture and persecution of ethnic minorities about which international silence is maintained. Far from making people free, democracy often leads to greater coercion and oppression than more traditional forms of rule. It seems that democracy may only be established through terror, coercion and war, while the most democratic countries, such as the U.S. and the U.K., are also the most aggressive when it comes to foreign military adventures and attacking other countries.

Not for nothing did the Russian leader Mr. Vladimir Putin state that he was revolted by the “pro-democracy rebels” of Syria who devoured the organs of their enemies. Under democracy, more and more such cannibalistic incidents are also occurring in South Africa.

Not only does Mr Mugabe understand democracy and its empty theatrics well, but his wife Grace has mastered the art of shopping better than any New York socialite.

Surely the elected leader of Zimbabwe deserves a better press?

This is an extended version of a letter published today in Business Day.

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