David Cameron’s attempts to show the Tory party has really, really changed would be slightly more credible if it weren’t 100% clear the Tories are still just the same as they ever were.
Further evidence of the Tories’ unchanging attitudes emerges courtesy of Richard Willis, a Tory councillor in Reading and their parliamentary candidate for Sutton & Cheam in 2005. Commenting on the website PoliticalBetting.com on the recent death of Ian Smith and his white-minority-rule UDI government in Rhodesia, Mr Willis gives a ringing endorsement of Smith’s approach:
I am very sorry to hear of the death of Ian Smith (former Rhodesian PM). He was a great leader of his country … it has been a silly platitude of the left for the last century (unfortunately all too often bought into by simple minds on the right) that the principle of democracy is more important than economic security and food on the table. … Ian Smith – may he rest in peace in the land he loved! … he was a more courageous leader than [Edward] Heath.
He later describes as “Spot on” another poster’s remarks that segregated Rhodesia was “an island of civility in a sea of contemporary barbarism”.
Mr Cameron still has his work cut out, it seems, if he really wants to convince the public the Tories have learned from their past mistakes.
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59 Comments
I wonder whether his boss Reading East Tory MP Robert Wilson shares these views…
“it has been a silly platitude of the left for the last century (unfortunately all too often bought into by simple minds on the right) that the principle of democracy is more important than economic security and food on the table.”
If you trade your freedom for bread, what will you do when they take your bread away.
BTW if anyone know who said this I’d like to know. I’ve a feeling I first came across it attributed to Manuel Roxas the founder of the Philippines Liberal Party but I could easily be wrong.
Just when you think they’ve gone as low they can go….(this week)
This is the same guy who said it was a good say when Edward Heath died…
He also praised Pinochet after his death. The man is appauling and as one of the people involved in the attempt to stop in getting onto council, I can only apoligise for failing.
How do you know that Rik W is the name used by Richard Willis … the only reference in the blog to Mr Willis is a quote from someone else?
6. Nice try, but he is not an anonymous poster on political betting and freely admits it. You can check previous posts if you like.
Indeed, Evan, as Dan says, Richard Willis (“RikW”) has form.
A more convincing line of defence might be that somebody logged in to his computer without his knowledge. His password, as everybody knows, is 1234. Grant Shapps got away with this line of defence…..
The quotes above are very selective. If you look at what was said in context he was talking about seeing governments in context. Your headline is also a travesty as Rik specifically condemned apartheid as “indefensible”. Facts that i am sure wont trouble you as Lib Demss.
Insider I am afraid the facts stack up very clearly against Mr Willis. He describes white minority rule as “indefensiable” while doing his damndest to defend it. He is not merely contrasting Smith with Mugabe, he is praising Smith as “a benign and successful leader.”
Mark, you should read the exchange. The headline for this article says he “praises apartheid” when he clearly does nothing of the kind. He condemned apartheid in his comments.
Rhodesia never practised apartheid as any student of history would know.
Having read through the thread in question, I can’t see Richard Willis “praising apartheid” at any point. So I think the headline is misleading.
The headline is a lie – no defense of apartheid was made, no matter how questionable the rest of Rlk W’s comments. If you have any respect for honesty you’ll change it and make it clear you’ve done so.
Is that Charlie windsor in person? I never thought you would post here….
You can claim that Rhodesia did not practice apartheid only in the same way that you can claim that Nazi Germany was not fascist. I.e.: by getting into a debate about classifications that is of interest mainly to historians and political scientists. For the purposes of this debate what matters is that the policies of the white Rhodesian government were undemocratic, illiberal and discriminatory and that Mr Willis is glorifying the man behind them.
15. Well, it’s a matter of fact that apartheid was a policy practiced in South Africa and nowhere else.
There have been plenty of states that have been (and are) racially discriminatory, but I’d advise you also against claiming Richard Willis praised racial discrimination, because that too would be untrue.
16. Saying that Mr Willis only praised the leader of a racist regime rather praising racial discrimination is a pretty feeble defence.
‘Tory PPC praises white supremacist’ might be a better title.
Richard Willis praised a racially discriminatory regime, Sean. You admit that.
I know you are a lawyer and I am but a layman, but I can’t see any significant difference between the two concepts of “racial discrimination” and a “regime that practises racial discrimination”, in terms of the current discussion.
16. Sean – the crime of apartheid does not apply only to Sth Africa:
The crime of apartheid is defined by the 2002 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court which established the International Criminal Court as inhumane acts of a character similar to other crimes against humanity “committed in the context of an institutionalised regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.”
Which sounds like Rhodesia under Smith to me.
So were Winston Churchill, Attlee, Lloyd George “white supremacists” because they presided over the then British Empire?
20 and Rik condemned the apartheid system specifically in his remarks. This attempt to demonise doesnt stack up.
No 16 wrote: “Well, it’s a matter of fact that apartheid was a policy practiced in South Africa and nowhere else.”
Really? What about the United States of America, parts of which practiced segregation as recently as 1964? This was the system upon which South African apartheid was modelled, don’t forget.
Ian Smith was a hero for much of the British right throughout the 190s and 1970s.
Ted Heath, by contrast, was the traitor who sacked Enoch Powell from the Shadow Cabinet and took Britain into the then Common Market.
Another prominent Tory whom I can remember praising apartheid was the late Mrs Mary Whitehouse, that icon of Christian traditionalists, enemy of free expression and persecutor of homosexuals.
Mr Willis is in fantastic company.
For some reason, the Tories have suddenly stopped posting on this site…..
Actually I would like to pay tribute to Sean Fear who at least posts as a Tory and under his own name.
In contrast to the majority of Tory posters who pretend to be defeatist Lib Dems.
The True racist is Mugabe. He started his rule with a persecution of Matabeles.
Then he turned his racism on whites. Then there was operation Clean up Trash. Then he turned on all blacks.
There was greater democracy under Smith. There was greater respect for Human Rights under Smith.
Mugabe is the Racist – along with YOU naieve white racist idiots who believe blacks should be happy under a black tyrant.
25 – The only true racism I’m detecting is contained in theat post, Mr Doolali – which seems to presume that, in Africa, the choice is between tyranical regimes differentiated only by colour or allegiance.
Mugabe is a dictator at the head of an evil, unjustifiable regime which perpetuates the privilege of a ruling elite to the active detriment of all others. Smith’s Rhodesia was no better.
It is consistant and indeed essential to be opposed to both in equal measure. Zimbabwe deserves a democratic and competent government which treats its citizens fairly and equally and governs to allow the nation to fulfil its potential. As do all countries – the choice is not simply one of available despots.
17. One can praise, say, Oliver Cromwell (many people on both Left and Right do) without necessarily being in favour of evicting Catholics from their property.
20 That would define the majority of African and Asian governments quite neatly.
23. The Dixie States practised a particularly spiteful form of racial segregation. However, I prefer to reserve the term “apartheid” for the South African system. The term “apartheid” (like “fascist” or “Nazi”) tends to get bandied around to abuse all sorts of governments, such as those of Israel or Northern Ireland, simply as a form of abuse.
Smith was, by any measure, a good deal better than Mugabe. The question (and I’m not sure of the answer) is whether his behaviour led directly to Mugabe’s rule, by radicalising black opinion, or whether he was genuinely trying to prevent the catastrophe which has subsequently befallen Zimbabwe.
27. “apartheid” – if that’s your preference then you’re entitled to hold it, but if (and I haven’t checked the reference yet) the poster of the definition from the 2002 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court is correct, then he is indeed praising an apartheid regime even if apologists are hiding behind that term being technically incorrect at the time of UDI.
In any case his logic is flawed (and not for the first time):
Evil dictator two is more evil than evil dictator one. It is a given that evil dictator two is bad, therefore it follows that evil dictator one is good.
People aren’t stupid. They know what he means.
Benjamin,
I am just trying to get my head around your definitions. Would you term Mugabe’s regime as apartheid in that power is split pretty much along racial/tribal lines (Xanus get the power, others can starve)? What about Saddam’s Iraq?
And are there any other current regimes would satisfy your instinctive definition of apartheid?
Also, out of interest, regardless of your racial background, which country would you prefer to live in: Smith’s Rhodesia or Mugabe’s Zimbawe?
Passing Tory… a fallacious argument. You assume that they were the only “choices” available. They became the only choices available after the traitor Smith declared UDI.
In fact it could be said that he was not only responsible for the deaths of people when he was in charge, but that he was culpable in the tradegy that has engulfed the country since.
wswaine,
I am amazed you know what I am assuming and what I am not. Are you a declared psychic? I think it is better if, once my questions have been answered, I am allowed to construct my argument, state my assumptions and then we can haggle over their validity.
28-31 It’s all a bit academic surely? Isn’t the point that Ian Smith was a white supremacist who ran a police state. By any objective definitions a bad man. Therefore anyone niaeve/stupid enough to eulogise him has a case to answer?
Dan,
I don’t think that these cases are quite so simple. One of my simple rules of thumb is that a government cannot be significantly more civilised than the effective opposition. Where this effective opposition is people of the nature of Mugabe it makes analysing the situation extremely complex.
Now, personally I wouldn’t rush to say that Smith was a great guy, but neither do I think he was as unmitigatedly evil as some would make out. And neither do I think that the British Empire was anything like as a malevolent force as many modern commentators would have you believe, which is one of the themes that I think underlies discussions on these topics.
It is strange that there is a general consensus that we should be spreading our technological advances to the rest of the world (who would argue that medicines developed in Europe should be denied to Africans?) without thinking what this actually means in terms of imperialism (of both the cultural and more traditional varieties).
In this regard, I am sure that many of the old inhabitants of Zimbabwe were more than happy to accept the agricultural advances that came with the white settlers, especially when it meant that there was food to eat when otherwise many would have starved. We can have high-minded discussions about different flavours of freedom; I’ll wager that many a Zimbawean right now would be quite happy to exchange their right to vote for having food on the table, petrol at the pumps and police who adhered to the rule of law.
In many ways there is a curious similarity between the way in which Mugabe was willing to use anti-racism as a political pawn and the way in which many of the LibDem posters on this thread flaunt their anti-racism credentials, and it concerns me deeply.
I realise that LibDems are desperately trying to shake off the “nasty party” tag that serial regicide has left them with, but is the sort of negative campaigning in the article above really the best way to achieve this? Or are you just trying to judge everyone else by your own low standards?
This is VERY funny – posted on pb.com by the awful Willis:
“A PERSONAL STATEMENT
Firstly, let me say how grateful I am for all of the comments I have received in the last couple of days. I have been staggered at the people who have sent me messages through a variety of means. Mostly people I have never met or spoken to before. It just goes to prove that the love of free speech is not dead (yet)!
Most of the regular readers of this site will have seen the debate the other night about Ian Smith and Robert Mugabe and the respective merits of their periods in power in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe. Some of you agreed with what I had to say about Ian Smith particularly and some didnt. Some people like ‘Tangent’ gave thoughtful reasons why he disgreed with my stance and I was happy to debate with him and commend his intelligent argument. A few of the usual suspects (like Dan Falchikov) twisted what was said in order to make a point and refused to answer the main points of my argument. I guess I am used to that. However what I find despicable and underhand is the way a certain (known) Lib Dem activist (and PB.com regular) has since then tried to create mischief outside of PB.com. I thought readers of this site (and particularly those in the public eye) should know how low some people will go to attempt to undermine their political opponents personally.
That individual (and I have a VERY good idea who it is) contacted the Press Association, other national media, local Lib Dems in Reading and Lib Dem Voice website to try to make the maximum capital out of selective quotes from what I said. Lib Dem Voice now carries a headline of “Tory PPC Praises Apartheid” and a few cut and pasted lines from a long debate. Now apart from the fact that I have not been a “Tory PPC” for over two years, I in no way praised apartheid; in fact I explicitly condemned it as “indefensible”. The Press Association clearly dont think there is much to the story and I had an interesting discussion with a reporter about the comments I had made and was able to put them into context.
I have no beef with the rough and tumble of debate on PB.com or elsewhere but I do think it is illustrative of how a small element of the Lib Dem activist base operates, that this individual was prepared to go to such lengths to try to cause trouble. To describe him as devious, underhand and deeply nasty would not begin to sum up the true extent of his personality. I am sure PB.com regulars, whether agreeing with my original comments or not, will agree that this sort of behaviour only serves to deter known figures from posting under their own names, and others from posting at all. This site is much the poorer for that.
I would like to thank those people who have posted supportive comments on here tonight of what I said and of me personally (Nick P stands out as a decent and honourable political foe). However, from now on I shall not post as Rik W anymore. I shall use another name (or names) and you can have fun trying to work out who I am. I will not be disappearing – the low life minority in the Lib Dems picked the wrong guy!
Oh and for the record, I deplore racism (and apartheid), as anyone who knows me will tell you. I have worked over many years in Reading and elsewhere to encourage ethnic minority candidates to stand and get them elected. It is just typical of an element of the Lib Dem activist base that there is no depth of untruth or scurrilous activity that they wont stoop to in order to try to undermine their political opponents. They truly are the nasty party!”
This awful Tory dolt also posted to pb.com about his love for the death penalty & how he’d like to do some of the executions himself, as well as posts supporting Pinochet.
33 – It’s a fair argument to say the Rhodesia/Zimbabwe debate isn’t that simple – clearly it isn’t. But the point about Willis was that he clearly thought Smith was ‘a great guy’. Otherwise why would he have said the following?
‘I am very sorry to hear of the death of Ian Smith (former Rhodesian PM). He was a great leader of his country and its a shame that he didnt outlive the tyrant Mugabe!!’
‘Smith was a benign and successful leader.’
‘Smith ensured 15 years of good rule and relative economic success’
‘Ian Smith – may he rest in peace in the land he loved!’
‘I refuse to submit to the prevalent ideology that a government that delivers stability and economic success is inherently evil just because the elite were of a racial minority’
Passing Tory…
I’m worried about your simple rule of thumb. The UK is screwed!
To be fair you ask a straight question: “which country would you prefer to live in?” But it’s a ‘have you stopped beating your wife?’ question. An alternative and equally valid question would be “would you prefer to live in Stalin’s Russia or Hitler’s Germany?” If I was making the assumption that you believed that Smith or Mugabe were the only possible outcomes then I apologise, but if you are asking which of the actual historical situations I’d ‘prefer’ then you are being disingenuous. They were not necessarily inevitable outcomes which would make my answer ‘neither’ equally valid.
I’m very puzzled by Rik’s public flouncing out of PB. Surely a man who stands by his words, has wide spread support and sees nothing wrong in what he has said has no need to start posting anonymously.
And I wonder who Mr. Willis had in mind… because I think he’s VERY wrong ;0)
The question here is whether Richard Willis has really praised the regime of Ian Smith.
A man who ordered the gunning down of his people in refugee camps – yet did not grant them the vote.
A man who – arguably – created the grotesque chaos of Mugabe by his militancy.
A man who – if not a practitioner of apartheid – did not allow most of the people of his country to have the vote, and practised racial segregation on a number of levels.
The facts are that the quotes summarised at (35) from Richard Willis suggest widespread endorsement of the Ian Smith regime in Rhodesia. From personal connections to that country, I find that, at best, a political throwback to the Bernard Manning era and a shock to come from the so-called modernised Conservative Party. The fact that this man appears to be on the Tories’ approved list of potential MPs is a disgrace.
wswaine,
On my simple rule of thumb; the effective opposition is not necessarily the official opposition. Indeed, in an ideal system the opposition are the people themselves, maybe articulated through official government opposition. But in many regimes that we profess to dislike (e.g. Russia today, Chile under Pinochet) a lot of the brutality of the government derives from the the extreme nature of the effective opposition, and I think that to ignore this leads to poor analysis.
Or to look at this from another angle; Churchill forced Welsh miners to work at gunpoint during WW2. Did this make him a bad man? Or did it just show his determination to repel the Nazi hegemony in mainland Europe? These are not the black and white moral questions you make them out to be.
In terms of the questions; the third was more of an afterthought; the more important questions are the first two, which no-one has cared to try to answer. Would you consider it reasonable if I were to post a headline “George Galloway voices support for apartheid” because he expressed sympathy for Saddam who headed an ethnically minority government imposed by a police state? Whatever Galloway’s faults (and they are legion) I think that most people would construe this headline as deliberately misleading.
Dan,
You correctly point out that I hold a different position to Willis. Part of this maybe that I am just more tolerant of those with views I disagree with. Part is because I see the issues as sufficiently complex that I feel it should be a topic for reasoned debate rather than name-calling.
It has been said repeatedly that it was not a simple choice between Mugabe or Smith. This might be so, but I suspect that trying to impose our current values on the situation is dangerous. I am reminded of the words of the glasnost-era Russian writer Fasil Iskander who wrote that (words to the effect that) “the slave is not looking for freedom, but for revenge”. And of course this is the tricky problem that Smith et al. had to handle. So, Smith making the argument that Zimbaweans would be better off under the regime he ran than under the alternatives (which essentially is what it all boils down to) is harder to dismiss than it seems at first. And I think that to tag people who would make the case for that position as “supporting apartheid” massively oversimplifies the arguments.
I, like Thatcher, would like to have hoped that once you handed power to the people that they would be able to make the right decisions for a country. Subsequent events have shown this to be overly optimistic regarding Zimbabwe.
38: “I, like Thatcher, would like to have hoped that once you handed power to the people that they would be able to make the right decisions for a country. Subsequent events have shown this to be overly optimistic regarding Zimbabwe.”
Aside from the issue of what’s ‘right’ usually depends on who you are (and we need to be sure to strip out any subconscious ethnocentrism in discussion of this sort) this sounds paternalistic to me. It certainly overlooks the immediate impact of whatever crisis has been allowed to happen before you ‘allow’ majority rule.
If you applied your argument to history then there’d be a pretty sound case for our island to have remained as a few subservient provinces of the Romans because it’d have ‘saved’ us from the dark ages and the horror of the norse invasions …
Zimbabwe is a disaster for sure, but waxing all nostalgic for failed systems which were designed in the past to protect privilige for the few won’t help. (But then, I suppose that you did say that you were a Tory …)
:o)
Passing Tory:
If you mean: is Galloway guilty of supporting an apartheid regime as defined under the Implementation of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court Act 2002 which states that: “the crime of apartheid” means inhumane acts of conduct of a character similar to those referred to in item 1 of this Part, committed in the context of an institutionalised regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime; then it depends on whether you think Georgeous George supported the regime or, as he’d undoubtedly insist, that he was only supporting ‘aid’ for the ‘people’.
There are undoubtedly many current regimes which I would be happy to class as apartheid under the above definition, including in answer to your question, Saddam’s Iraq and Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.
On the other hand if you prefer to stick with the ‘South African’ only definition then no. It’s your choice and one you are entitled to make. But it’s really just playing with words. Someone calling Nazi Germany ‘fascist’ would not be subjected to the same dissection of semantics. If it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck… it’s more often than not a duck.
On the other hand I agree with you that historical context should be taken into consideration and I do have the view that it is dangerous to inflict our current values on history, but there is only so far you can take that. I’m not suggesting that in this case the answers were ever black and white, quite the contrary in fact, but they were the only ‘choices’ that we were being offered in this debate in defence of the “benign’ Smith.
Plantation owners thought of themselves as good men, but it is legitimate comment to now call the trade evil and wicked even though slavery was undoubtedly legal at the time. Even allowing for history to be taken into context, I couldn’t call them good men. In the choices given to us by Willis we have to choose Good or Evil, when as you suggest it’s not always that simple. I’d still put them on the evil side of neutral even with hindsight.
Your point about Churchill is an interesting distraction, but it hard to argue that his government was acting without the majority support of the people, which surely is a crucial test.
Good to see you don’t feel the need to take your ball away ;0)
wswaine,
On a personal level, I am less picky about what you choose to define terms as along as you are consistent and the meaning is clear. So, in closed debate you define you terms in whatever way makes sense to form coherent arguments. The trouble starts when you use terms that have one meaning in general usage to mean something related but different. For eaxmple, “apartheid” is generally understood to refer to the specific regime in South Africa and so to use it to mean something different without making this clear is, at best, misleading and could reasonably be described as dishonest.
I think that you have inadvertantly shown another weakness in your position in your discussion of plantation owners and slavery. To what extent where the men themselves evil and to what extent where they just operating within a system and society that we now see the gaping injustices of? Or to take WW2; is it not possible to praise Guderian’s innovations in tank warfare without condoning the regime in which he existed, or the horrible evils of the Eastern front of which he was a leading figure?
There is a subtle difference between calling Smith benign, and relatively benign, although the former is often shorthand for the latter and this is maybe where the misunderstandings in this case arise from.
Disappointing contributions from a number of Tory contributors here.
The Tory party has form on Rhodesia/Zimbabwe. Historically there has been a strong support for the colonial settler elite that dominated the country up to 1980 and deprived native Africans of their political rights. It’s a pity that so many appear to be acting as apologists on this issue today as well.
The argument that Smith’s regime was not apartheid is one of semantics. It’s true that ‘aparthied’ as the Dutch name suggest’s is a Boer concept which corralled Africans into separate public services and eventually in separate Bantustan ‘homelands’. None-the-less, Tories have to recognise that Smith’s govt was all white. Blacks were denied basic civil rights on the basis of their skin colour, they were not allowed to particpate politically in the Governance of their own country.
You can’t help but feel that there remains a belief in parts of the Tory party Africans aren’t fit to run their own affairs. Mugabe has been horrendous, but neighbouring South Africa gives the lie to this nostolgic yearning for the imperial glory years.
Just re read my posting – I don’t want to suggest that Sean Fear who’s posting on political betting.com I greatly admire, and passing Tory are anti African, but from the long history of Rik Willis’s postings there I think that is exactly what he is, and he is representatove of the same nasty streak in the Tory party that were so supportive of Pinochet.
The Tory party has form on Rhodesia/Zimbabwe. Historically there has been a strong support for the colonial settler elite that dominated the country up to 1980 and deprived native Africans of their political rights.
And of course the Liberal party had absolutely nothing to do with the way that the politics of southern Africa developed at the end of C19 …
As for the arguments about semantics over apartheid, as I wrote above I don’t really care how you choose to define terms, but in the public sphere where “apartheid” is generally considered to specifically refer to South Africa it is disingenuous to pretend that the headline of this thread is not deliberately misleading.
As for the fitness of Africans to run their own affairs, it all depends a little on what you mean by this. Should tribes be encouraged to pursue their old customs of female genital mutilation? Should we turn a blind eye to the sexual practices in South Africa that have facilitated the spread of AIDS? Should we try to persuade Mbeki that his rather quaint notion that HIV and AIDS are not linked is wrong? Indeed, should we promote formal democracy in cultures which have no tradition of it? Should we ban all evangelism? Trying to pretend that we should not interfere at all has its own drawbacks, and deciding where to draw the line is by no means as simple as many of the Lib Dem posters here seem to suggest.
45. ludicrous
Colin,
Always nice to see people falling back on reasoned argument 😉
I don’t need a reasoned argument when you post ludicrous racist crap like this:
“As for the fitness of Africans to run their own affairs, it all depends a little on what you mean by this. Should tribes be encouraged to pursue their old customs of female genital mutilation? Should we turn a blind eye to the sexual practices in South Africa that have facilitated the spread of AIDS? Should we try to persuade Mbeki that his rather quaint notion that HIV and AIDS are not linked is wrong?”
That is racist crap? No, it is about the interaction of cultures and it is a tricky area to which modern left-wing liberalism has singularly failed to produce a coherent response.
Which of those facts listed above would you dispute? Which of them would you not feel is handled in a more sophisticated way in the UK than in e.g. South Africa? Now, would you argue that we in the UK have the right to try to “persuade” (usually using pretty crude financial mechanisms) others that our ways are right, or not?
The fact is that much of Africa is currently governed in a structure not at all dissimilar to colonial rule: a small political elite supported by overseas companies (generally interested in mineral wealth and the like) and maintain power using some pretty crude methods. And now the foreign string-pullers don’t even try to understand the culture they are exploiting. Given this, it is maybe not surprising that the most successful regimes are often those with the poorest natural wealth. E.g. compare Burundi with the DR Congo.
Wake up Colin, and see the world as it is rather than how you would like it to be. And labelling anyone as racist who tries to tackle these areas is a childish response which suggests to me you are more interested in playing political games than actually trying to get to the bottom of problems.
Passing Tory: You define my meaning of apartheid as being acceptable in a closed debate. However, I think the status of apartheid from the Implementation of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court Act 2002 puts the broader meaning implied in the title also as a reasonable public interpretation.
I guess we will have to agree to disagree.
I went to school with some charming examples of Rhodesian emigrées. Perhaps that does colour my perception of the situation.
Of course you’re a racist, anyone who could come out with this revealing little phrase:
“As for the fitness of Africans to run their own affairs..” is clearly someone who doesn’t believe in self-determination.
As for the rest of your garbage about supposed African sexual practices, HIV & Thabo Mbeki’s minority-of-one belief that AIDS isn’t caused by HIV, well , speaks for itself, doesn’t it?
Colin
I find it sickening that you are so keen to jump on the anti-racism bandwagon that you don’t bother to read properly.
Look in the posts above – the phrase “fit to run their own affairs” was first used by the the (presumably Lib Dem) Charles Anglin (43); I was merely using his own wording for clarity. Maybe I should have quoted it, but I had rather assumed that the Lib Dems who post here are interested in trying to discuss things in a mature and sensible way. Clearly I was mistaken in your case.
To take each point at a time. Are you telling me that the HIV epidemiology in South Africa doesn’t indicate patterns that would arouse considerable concern if they were identified in the UK? The question then is what YOU would do about this. In the UK no doubt there would be a call to set up initiative or two to protect women’s rights. Would you support this? So what about SA? Let each society solve its own problem? Set up international initiatives to change them?
And the point about Mbeki is not whether he believes it (and I find it mind-boggling that you claim he is the only one; do you actually know any of the facts here?) but whether we, with a different point of view (and with quite a body of science behind us) have the right to impose our values or not.
Note, I haven’t even taken a stance on this. I am merely asking what YOU would advise doing; something that you are curiously reluctant to do.
Passing Tory,
mmmmmm…would the example of Silvio berlusconi or the recently defeated Polish Govt, or perhaps Franco’s Spain or the Colonels in Greece be useful evidence for questioning European’s ability to run their own affairs? All peoples have bad, incompetent or wicked rulers from time to time. African states, barely 50 years old are still struggling to embed good governance but theat is no surprise gien that the vast majority are entirely artifical states crweated as the last throw of the imperial dice.
As for the historic culpability of the Liberal party, certainly Liberal imperialist played their part. But the historic Tory form I was referring to was not at the turn of the last century, but rather during the 60’s & 70’s and on that the Tories were way out there on their own.
As for whether you are a racist or not, I have no idea, but what you do appear to be is a paternalist who believes that perhaps European’s should intervene more to save Africans from themselves. That is an old imperialist excuse as Kipling put it ‘take up the white man’s burden & send forth the best ye breed’. Speaking as the descendent of slaves brought from Africa to work on plantations in the Carribean when I look back at the last 500 years African hhistory, I think the continent would have been a great deal better off without that kind of help thank you.
Charles,
Thank you for the reasoned reply.
The curious thing is that I don’t seem to recall ever having stated whether or not one culture should impose on others. Yes, Europe has bad governments from time to time. Indeed, if you are into one of several branches of Islam, then all European governments should be considered wrong and converted.
Now, if you think that we should just stay out then that is fine. It happens to be a position I largely agree with. But there are gaping inconsistencies here on several levels. We see a regime like Zimbabwe (which is where this whole debate started) and the natural response is that we should do something. And I reckon that many of your fellow Lib Dems would agree. And then what about Western medicine vs folk medicine in many cultures? Is it morally justifiable to live and let die? Should we make no attempt to eradicate poverty in Africa? Should we slash our aid budget?
From this, it is quite possible to argue that your “leave Africa alone problem” approach, understandable as it is from a historical context, is extremely selfish. Indeed, if I put forward the position that you have just stated, I am sure that ColinW would be on me in a flash with some accusation of only wanting to look after myself.
You pays your money and toakes your choice. But once you start to interfere, it is very hard to argue empirically for where you draw the line?
That is why I think that the “right” of states to run their own affairs warrants deep discussion, and why I find ColinW’s cries of racism so immature.
His comments seem to have been grossly taken out of context. After all, Mr Smith’s government was a stable one and Rhodesia a relatively prosperous place. He was a relic to be sure but surely the lesser of two evils when compared to Mugabe who is starving – killing – his people and ruining his country.
AP-T… at last, you have finally got it. “The lesser of two evils” is indeed a valid interpretation of Smith, not “good” and “benign”. And wasn’t the Third Reich a “stable” and “relatively prosperous place”.
Willis’s quotes in “context” are just as bad as in selective parts. Judging from the times of his postings, I think the milk and cookies were keeping him awake.
To be fair to him, which I don’t like doing, he is only reflecting what a large underbelly of Tories believe anyway and quite mild compared with one particular Rickmansworth councillor I’ve spoken to.
Interesting discussion on revolving round notions of “less badness” and “least worstness”. Of course many of the examples from history reflect the moral relativism of many, if not most, political decisions. But as far as Rhodesia/Zimbabwe’s concerned. Smith could have been stopped by a more robust policy from the British government of the time – Wilson’s explicit ruling out of force in the face of UDI has to rank as one of the poorest decisions of his long career. The Liberals at the time were laughed at for suggesting that the RAF should bomb the oil pipeline into the country and bring the Rhodesian economy to its knees (“Bomber Thorpe”)but perhaps that would have been a feasible thing to do and might have saved worse problems. Let’s remember also that great Rhodesian/Zimbabwean liberal Garfield Todd. H e was subjected to internal exile under Smith and then under Mugabe. Tells you something about being a true liberal, doesn’t it?
32 No Ian Smith was not a white supremacist. No he was not by any measure a bad man.
Mugabe is a Bad Man. You are a ‘useful idiot’.
58 come off it Tory troll. Smith denied equal rights to non-whites, ordered the murder of hundreds of his people in refugee camps, and created the circumstances for Mugabe to take control.
Just by declaring UDI he removed any chance of a proper orderly handover – which in itself, given subsequent history, is bad enough.